Abstract

Dance is an 1100-line dialogic drama rambic pentameter free verse between one Nisus, a philosophical seeker, and Amanda, a Beatrice-like embodiment of divine wisdom. The author uses the drama to argue three theses: The inherent identity of thought and reality and the validity of speculative idealism as an approach to knowledge of the world; the necessity for positing an Absolute Spirit as the ultimate standard of truth; and the concrete actuality of this absolute. In thirty long footnotes at the end of the poem Beach indicates how the ideas pursued in the poem can be traced through Hegel’s philosophy of absolute idealism.