Within modern commercial-industrial economies with their demands to be technically productive and their massive inequalities, many people feel their creative powers to be blocked or stunted, as “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” Charles Altieri has been long one of our best readers of paintings and works of literature as well as one of our most insightful theorists of their value. In this important new book he argues that imaginative involvement with paintings, poems, and novels can move us beyond consumption and forward into new orders of experience, meaning, and satisfaction that are vital for both democratic culture and genuinely humane life. God help us if we fail to take this powerful argument seriously.

Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, USA

Charles Altieri has been for some time our most eloquent and impassioned advocate for the intrinsic value of education in literature and art. He has an extraordinary ability to give fine-grained descriptions of what it is like to actually experience poems or paintings in a way that opens new dimensions of knowledge of the world and other people. In this latest book, which he indicates might be his last, he proposes a new distinction between what he calls “experience of,” our everyday practical experience, and “experience as,” the modes of imaginative involvement that art develops. Readers new to Altieri might find their appetite whetted by starting out with the fascinating appendix in which he compares two AI-generated poems to the human-made models that they are competing with. Altieri always makes for challenging reading, but it is always worth the effort.

Henry Staten, Lockwood Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington, USA

An exhilarating book that demonstrates how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable are the uses of any world that scorns the powers of imagination. Altieri makes the intensities and sympathies the arts can generate spring to life on every page.

John McGowan, John W. and Anna H. Hanes Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina, USA

An ambitious and insightful critique, The Imaginative Experience in the Arts offers a penetrating apology for the impact of the liberal arts education and of the crucial importance of the imagination to nurturing contemplation and thus cultivating the development of the personal skills and powers necessary for a civil society. The book brings great clarity to complex ideas Altieri has been exploring for decades. From a philosophical perspective, through the filter of Heidegger, Hegel and Kant, Charles Altieri, one of the few most brilliant readers of artistic expression in our time, demonstrates how art can ennoble us and enrich the world.

Viorica Patea, Professor of American Literature, University of Salamanca, Spain