Kant's "Critique of Judgment" distinguishes aesthetic judgment (the judgment of taste) from both theoretical and practical judgment, arguing that aesthetic judgments claim universal validity while being grounded in subjective feeling — this paradox is the philosophical condition of all critical response to poetry; In Aristotle's practical philosophy, judgment (phronesis, practical wisdom) is the capacity to perceive what is right in the particular situation — a perception that exceeds the application of general rules — and this model of situated judgment has influenced poets who see the poem as a training ground for ethical discernment; A poet writing about legal proceedings (a trial, a tribunal) might use judgment as a philosophical concept — exploring the gap between the formal rules of legal judgment and the moral judgment that the situation demands; Arendt's political philosophy of judgment — drawing on Kant's aesthetic judgment as a model for political thinking — argues that the capacity to see from multiple perspectives (enlarged mentality) is the foundation of genuine political judgment, and this concept informs poetry that seeks to hold multiple perspectives in productive tension; The New Critical practice of close reading is an exercise in judgment — the training of a faculty capable of discriminating between genuine complexity and mere obscurity, between achieved form and technical failure; In Dickinson's poetry, judgment (both divine and human) is a persistent theme — the poem stages the soul's encounter with evaluative authority, asking on what grounds such authority can claim to assess the value of a life or a work