Ben Philipps

Thesis title: Philosophy and Style in Modern American Poetry

Supervisor: Professor Matthew Bevis

Research interests: Modern Anglophone poetry, poetics, philosophy and/of/as literature (esp. pragmatism and philosophy of language post-Wittgenstein), stylistics, humour, literary criticism.

(Some) writers of interest: John Ashbery, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Cavell, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Nelson Goodman, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Publications/Essays/Papers:

'Evasive Species', n+1, 51 (2025), https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/reviews/evasive-species/

‘The Comedian as Wallace Stevens’, Essays in Criticism, 74.1 (2024), pp. 48–65, doi:10.1093/escrit/cgae002.

'That Funny Money-Man: A Hundred Years of Harmonium', Critical Quarterly, 66.3 (2024), pp. 119-125, doi:10.1111/criq.12781

'The Chateau Hardware', Annulet, 8 (2024), https://annuletpoeticsjournal.com/Ben-Philipps-On-John-Ashbery-s-The-Chateau-Hardwarer

'Reading the Data Subject’ (as member of the Privacy Settings Collective), Post45, cluster on ‘Reading with Algorithms’ (2023).

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'Auden, Langland, and the Alliterative Apocalyptic', New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry and Cultural History, UEA, 1st September 2025

'Stevens, Cavell, and the Unexplained', ALA Annual Conference, Boston, 24th May 2025

'Crusoe at Home: Poetry and Private Language', Philosophy and Poetics: An Interdisciplinary Conference, All Souls College, Oxford, 26th November 2024

I also write general criticism, e.g. this review of August Kleinzahler's A History of Western Music, or this piece about Liz Berry. My poems occasionally appear in magazines and anthologies; I was the winner of the 2024 Telegraph Poetry competition. An interview I did about that (plus the poem) is available here: https://archive.is/OgRP6.