The Poetry
of Philosophy

“What on earth is
   a ‘concrete universal’?”

— Said to be an annotation
(undated)
by Robert M. Pirsig of
A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston,
Society of Jesus.

For an answer, see
“The Structure of the
‘Concrete Universal’
in Literature,”
by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.,
PMLA, Vol. 62, No. 1
(March, 1947), pp. 262-280.

This is reprinted in Wimsatt’s
The Verbal Icon:
Studies in the
Meaning of Poetry.

The final chapter of
The Verbal Icon
is titled
“Poetry and Christian Thinking.”
For more on Wimsatt
and this topic, see
“Reclaiming the Bible
as Literature,”
by Louis A. Markos.