Levinas's philosophy of exteriority — the claim that the Other is radically exterior, exceeding every concept and category through which we try to grasp it — informs a poetics of the encounter with radical difference, where the poem must resist its own tendency to domesticate otherness; The phenomenological concept of intentionality — consciousness as always directed toward an object that is exterior to it — suggests that poetry, as a form of heightened consciousness, is constitutively oriented toward exteriority, toward the world beyond the self; A poet writing about travel or exile might use exteriority as a philosophical concept — the experience of being outside one's native world, confronting genuine cultural otherness — as the condition from which a new and less complacent perception becomes possible; Derrida's "Of Grammatology" makes exteriority — the supplement, the writing that was supposed to be merely exterior to speech — into the philosophically primary term: the "exterior" is what actually constitutes the supposedly pure interior; In Romantic poetry, the relationship between interior self and exterior world is a primary philosophical concern — Wordsworth's "spots of time" record moments of exchange between interiority and exteriority, where the external world actively forms the inner life; Stevens's "The Snow Man" stages the philosophical problem of exteriority — the poem approaches the ideal of a purely exterior perception (the mind of winter that perceives nothing but what is there) while simultaneously showing that human consciousness always brings something from inside to its encounter with the outside