"At defining junctures in their writings, philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Cassirer, and Heidegger demonstrate that they were keenly alive to the visionary authority of the work of artistic genius as an originary stimulus to the philosophical imagination. This book undertakes to make explicit that shared insight. The reader is invited to follow and indeed appropriate ontological, phenomenological, and onto-aesthetic attunements to the poetic work of John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. The inquiry thus aims not only to demonstrate but also to engender a firsthand sense of the energizing and speculative value to philosophical thinking of intermediating conceptual engagements with the visionary work of poetic genius." "In sum, this original inquiry uniquely respects the cognitional diversity that distinguishes the revelatory poetic spirit from the discursively speculative spirit, even as it demonstrates their deep affinities and mutual implications in the life of the imaginative intelligence."--BOOK JACKET.