The practical muse

This book reconsiders the poetics of three modernist writers, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, in connection with the pragmatism of William James. Since the late 1970s, Richard Rorty has written about "neo-pragmatism," a way of testing "truths" according to consequence rather than correspondence. Rorty's "neo-pragmatism" has become the reigning definition of pragmatism, and his interpretation of literary modernism is widely accepted. Patricia Rae's study, while accepting Rorty's view that there is philosophical solidarity between pragmatism and modernism, rejects his…