Renate Wood: Sensibility and the End of Pure Reason (January 1999)

In this lecture, Renate Wood draws on sources as diverse as critical writing by T.S. Eliot, a poem by Stanley Kunitz, and contemporary neuroscience to explore the relationship between the mind and body, and to update the concept of poetic sensibility. Arguing that there is no such thing as pure reason, but that feeling is actually cognitive, Wood suggests that we need a sensibility with a full range of acute feeling informing thought, in order to produce writing that is accountable to an increasingly complex reality.