The project was funded for four and a half years from January 2005, and was based in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge. The award-holders were Professor Adrian Armstrong in Manchester (Principal Investigator) and Professor Sylvia Huot in Cambridge (Co-Investigator), with the collaboration of Professor Sarah Kay (Princeton University). The Research Associates who worked on this project were Dr Rebecca Dixon, Dr Miranda Griffin, Dr Francesca Nicholson and Dr Fionnùala Sinclair. In more prosaic terms, the same poet writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” 21True poetry participates in this “cleansing” of the perceptual faculties by sweeping aside the cobwebs occluding the hidden passages connecting all things, polishing phenomena to reflective translucence, granting us an experience of the One in everything and everything in each one—the universality of things in their particularity, and their particularity in their universality. 22 As James C. Taylor writes in Poetic Knowledge, “Poetic experience indicates an encounter with reality that is nonanalytical, something that is perceived as beautiful, awful (awe-full), spontaneous, mysterious. It is true that poetic experience has the surprise of metaphor found in poetry, but also found in common experience, when the mind, through the senses and emotions, sees in delight, or even in terror, the significance of what is really there.” 23 Here too, the link to Nietzsche and critical philosophy—at least as it will be developed by Deleuze—is central. In Deleuze’s hands, as we will see later, the notion of the will to power is turned inside out: the will to power is not a will to domination, Deleuze will argue, but a will whose power is precisely willing. As he writes in 1962, but will also rehearse in 1965 and 1968, « la puissance est ce qui veut dans la volonté ». Yet, as Deleuze makes clear in his shorter book on Nietzsche in 1965, the will whose power is to will is precisely Dionysus : “Power, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will ( Dionysus himself),” Deleuze writes in 1965. Dionysus himself! And Deleuze adds, “The will to power is the differential element from which derive the force at work, as well as their respective quality in a complex whole.” In other words, Dionysus is the power of the will to power—which is precisely what Césaire identified.

Birds are also central to the mythical origin of Sanskrit poetry, according to which the first verse ( shloka) was composed as the sage Vālmīki was happily watching a pair of mating cranes in the river, when suddenly, a hunter’s arrow killed one of the birds, and thereupon its mate gave a piercing, mournful cry and died of grief. Moved by this tragic scene and spotting the hunter, Vālmīki extemporaneously proclaimed the first verse of Sanskrit poetry, which became the model for the structure of the Rāmāyaṇa: You will find no rest for the long years of Eternity As opposed to George Bataille before him, or Gilles Deleuze after him, Césaire would not mention Nietzsche by name, nor engage or analyze his thought out loud. The conversation was a silent one—drawing on and developing themes that were central to Nietzsche. But the relation was pivotal, and it would highlight a key aspect of Césaire: the vitality of poetic knowledge as the truly human, life as an art form, and artistic creation as the source of political struggle and revolution. These would be central to the movement of Négritude that Césaire, Senghor, Léon Gontran Damas (1912–1978), and others, especially Jane, Paulette and Andrée Nardal in Paris, [7] would develop during the decades after the war, and that would inspire and nourish liberation movements throughout Africa and the Caribbean. In this regards, Césaire was not alone. As Bachir Souleymane Diagne reminds us, Senghor as well was inspired by Nietzsche, and he repeatedly stressed that Négritude philosophy was deeply connected to Nietzsche. In fact, Senghor would place Négritude under the sign of the 1889 revolution, explicitly relating it to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), where poetry is the ultimate expression of philosophy. [8] Zhang, Wei. “Knowing Characters and Knowing Authors: ‘Poetic Knowledge’ in Ancient Greece and Early China.” CHS Research Bulletin 1, no. 2 (2013). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ZhangW.Knowing_Characters_and_Knowing_Authors.2013Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, This passage has often been read as an elaboration of the earliest canonical statement of Chinese poetics, which we see in the Classic of Documents: “Poetry verbalizes intent, and song prolongs words”. [12] The statement that “poetry verbalizes intent” is generally considered to be the first programmatic and most authoritative principle of Chinese poetics. [13] It is an “etymological” definition, for originally both characters 詩 and 志 composed of the character 止, and when combined with the character for “heart” (心) it is 志, but when combined with the character for “verbalization” (言), it is 詩. Therefore, it is etymologically significant to say that 志 is the intention stored in mind and 詩 is the verbalization (言) of intention (志). [14] As Stephen Owen points out, the assumption under this canonical definition of Chinese poetry is the model of an internal-external correlation. What is internal, the intention on the mind of the poet, gets verbalized in a poem as its external manifestation. When the mind is fixed on something, it incites external manifestation of which poetry is a prime form. [15] It is also important to create a space in which your class can ask questions about a poem. Especially for younger learners, some may find the new forms of writing and language difficult to comprehend at first. As poetry is often directly related to speaking and performance, some more quiet learners may find these classes most difficult, not only when speaking aloud but also when sharing aspects of the poem they don’t understand. This means creating a space for questions is essential when ascertaining how well a particular poem is understood by your learners. Ask your learners to identify rhyming words, identify imagery and metaphors, and speak openly about meanings they don’t quite get. This ensures no learner is left behind. Since Aristotle leaves lyric poetry largely out of discussion, we can only surmise that he would take the lyric poet’s voice as a persona, a fictionalized “I”. It would therefore also give us knowledge of the fictionalized “I” as character. In this regard, it is telling that Aristotle asserts emphatically that the poet himself should speak as little as possible, but only through his characters. So in his construction of “poetic knowledge” the poet as author must give way to his work, to the characters. By contrast, in the end-product of explicit poetics in China it is precisely the author who comes to the foreground. “Poetic knowledge” is construed to be a process of knowing the author of a poem as a person. Let us now turn to the cultural context in which this type of “poetic knowledge” was prioritized.

Fifth and finally, the importance of myth. For Césaire, the mythic is the space of poetry and invention. Césaire writes: Imagery: describing what the narrator is seeing, hearing, or experiencing. Imagery intends to paint a picture in the mind of the reader through specific and vibrant language, to ensure they see exactly what the author wants them to see. Imagery is not simply about sight either: it can be used to appeal to any of the senses, such as smell or taste. An example of imagery is William Wordsworth’s description of “a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils” on a hill. The whole poem is long, but well worth devoting ten or fifteen minutes to reading, whether you’re familiar with Whitman’s distinctive and psalmic free verse style or new to the world of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

In the introductory section of the Poetics Aristotle starts off to construct the “natural” origin and evolution of poetry as the framework of his mimetic model. It is designed to replace the poet’s conception of the divine origin of poetry as inspiration. As Aristotle explains, the mimetic genesis of poetry has two “natural” causes: the “natural” instinct to engage in mimetic activity, and the “natural” inclination to enjoy in mimetic objects. Both these causes are explained by a common factor, that is, the human nature to learn and to understand ( to manthanein) which leads to knowledge. [7] Thus, both as producer and recipient of mimesis, man takes pleasure in cognition. Once born of its mimetic origin, poetry evolved to its “natural” telos by realizing its mimetic possibilities in different genres, reaching its highest form in Attic tragedy. You could start by bringing in three or four example poems to the classroom; these poems could be well-known, such as the work of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, or more modern humourous poems. Once the class has heard them and had a chance to say them out loud, ask them to write down what a poem is, before providing your own definition. These definitions do not have to be correct, but they provide a space for your learners to think deeply about what they have heard and begin to discover what makes poetry unique from other forms of writing. The reasons for their differences in emphasis are twofold. First, the notion of a “poetic knowledge” was formulated in ancient Greece in the specific context of philosophy’s competition with poetry for the authority of knowledge and truth, the result of which was the articulation of explicit poetics in Plato and Aristotle. Poetry was transformed from the knowledge of all things based on the model of inspiration to a special knowledge based on the model of mimesis under the tutelage of philosophy, so that its cognitive function could be philosophically analyzed. In Aristotle’s Poetics this process reached its final completion as the mimetic model totally replaces the poetic model of inspiration. Like other forms of reading, poetry introduces learners to new vocabulary. However, one important difference is that poetry often follows strict rules of rhythm and form. This limitation often means that poets need to choose specific words or place them into new contexts to rhyme or fit a meter. As a result, learners can discover new contexts in which to use their vocabulary and transfer these fresh connections within their own work. Here’s another oft-quoted line which is especially apt for this selection of poems: ‘Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers’. Tennyson himself said that this 1835 poem represents ‘young life, its good side, its deficiencies, and its yearnings.’

It has been said that no non-seer can be deservingly called a poet, and one is a seer only by virtue of his vision. Vision is the power of disclosing intuitively the reality underlying the manifold materials in the world and their aspects. To be termed a “poet” in the authoritative texts it is enough to be possessed of this vision of reality. But in everyday speech the world accords that title to him alone who possesses vision as well as expression. Thus, though the first poet (Vālmīki) was highly gifted with enduring and clear vision, he was not hailed as a poet by people until he embodied it in a descriptive work. 59 Fourth, the anti-dialectic: Césaire drew explicitly on André Breton, a formative influence, for his method. Some commentators trace Breton’s method to the Hegelian dialectic, thereby linking Césaire and Hegel. “The dialectic Césaire invoked was that of Hegel colored by an occultism characteristic of André Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto and Pierre Mabille…” [10] It is not entirely clear to me, though, that that is right. On my reading, there is more of an anti-dialectic here in Césaire—one that is reflected more in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche as the ultimate anti-Hegelian. In other words, scientific faith reveals, more than anything, the moral dimension of truth—it offers a genealogy of truth. This is precisely how Gilles Deleuze, in his 1962 book on Nietzsche and Philosophy, will read Nietzsche’s intervention: The will to truth, Deleuze too shows, is a moral quest. « L’homme qui ne veut pas tromper veut un monde meilleur et une vie meilleure ; toutes ses raisons pour ne pas tromper sont des raisons morales. » And to expose this, Deleuze will maintain, is the very basis of a truly critical philosophy—the basis of true critique. We are here, with Césaire and Nietzsche, at the core, at the heart of what Deleuze will refer to as « la vraie réalisation de la critique » and « l’élément critique » : the moral value of truth, the value of values. Césaire draws, for an illustration of this impoverishment, on a story from Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will. It concerns knowing what a lion really is. One cannot know, the story goes, if one studies only the lion; to understand the lion, one also needs to know the antelopes and the zebras that the lions chase, the steppes where the lions live, the grass that the antelopes graze. “The same goes for knowledge,” Césaire write. “Scientific knowledge is a lion without antelopes and zebras.” It is barren. Scientific knowledge just delivers somewhat useless facts, “just-so” knowledge. The first has to do with the character of poetic knowledge. Césaire begins Poésie et connaissance with an ode to poetics and diatribe against science. Scientific knowledge, for Césaire, is one-dimensional and impoverished. The sciences classify things, but do not comprehend them. They offer at best surface knowledge. Physics does not get to the essence; mathematics is too abstract and unreal. The sciences are thin: they measure and classify, but give us nothing more.Connecting this process to spiritual enlightenment, Liu Xie writes, “Therefore we know that through the sages the way transmits wen, and that the sages rely on wento manifest the way,” and Stepien comments, “This means that, by authoring works of wen, those engaged in literary craft embody, manifest, enlighten ( ming) the way inherently at work in all nature.” 53That is, properly patterned literature, such as good poetry, both reflects and emerges from the very nature of reality. It is the full flowering of the “mind of heaven and earth,” the fruit containing the seed from which the entire cosmic tree emerged. 54Liu Xie contrasts this true literature of the titular “carving dragons” ( dioalong), which naturally expresses and completes the very pattern of the fabric of reality, with the pejorative “carving insects” ( diaochong), the shallow artifice of “frippery poetastery,” 55 concluding his classic work with the following verse: If literature conveys the mind In Césaire’s 1944 manifesto, Poésie et connaissance, the French poet and philosopher draws on and develops, he enriches Nietzsche’s writings along at least five dimensions.

Song of Myself’ is perhaps the definitive achievement of the great nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman (1819-92), and is, among other things, a celebration of identity and of the importance of knowing ourselves. However, clear accounts of this and related forms of knowledge are found in the Islamic philosophical tradition, particularly that of the Ishrāqī tradition inaugurated by Suhrawardī and its later development in the works of Mullā Śadrā and others, where this kind of knowledge is described as knowledge by presence ( al-¢ilm al-ĥuđūrī)—the presence of the known in the consciousness/soul of the knower, who thus knows it through direct self-knowledge, in contrast to knowledge by representation ( al-¢ilm al-rasmī), in which the object of knowledge is known indirectly, as through a definition. 74 Poetic knowledge is thus a knowledge born of love, intimacy, and union, the knowledge of a seemingly other as self. As the poet said: If not for You, we would not know Love Each organiser contains a number of detailed, clear, and colourful sections explaining the key elements of the poem:

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In the Mao Shi, the Minor Prefaces link each poem to a historical moment, a certain individual in a certain situation. [20] They even supply the names and details of time and place to which the obscure metaphors, analogies and other figurative speech were believed to allude. To take an example, Guan Jü, the first poem, is set up as the paradigm to inaugurate a process of “influence”, a program of moral education implicit in the structure given by its legendary editor, Confucius. The first poem is thus interpreted to celebrate the virtue of the Queen Consort of King Wen of the Zhou Dynasty, and through the performance of this poem, “the relations between husband and wife are made correct.” Similarly, the other poems were also meant to give paradigmatic expression to human feelings and behavior, and those who learned and recited the Songs would naturally internalize correct values. In a whole range of human relations, husband and wife, parent and child, superior and inferior, etc., the regulatory power of poetry is at work. Thus, the songs are an instrument of education and civilization (詩教，教化), transformation of one’s personality through poetry in the education of the good Confucian. This myth is closely related to the Jungian archetype—to which Césaire explicitly makes reference in “Poetry and Knowledge.” And it is through myth—as well as words and images, love and humor—that we find our vitality in the world. « Première proposition ». Le poète est cet être très vieux et très neuf, très complexe et très simple qui aux confins vécus du rêve et du réel, du jour et de la nuit, entre absence et présence, cherche et reçoit dans le déclenchement soudain des cataclysmes intérieurs le mot de passe de la connivence et de la puissance. » We see in the Mao Shi the convergence and the culmination of the moralization and historicization of the Three Hundred Songs. In this process of canonization, poetry (as exemplified in the collection of the Songs) was squarely confined to the domain of human knowledge, that is, knowledge of moral intention and its accompanying socio-political conditions. Poetry was understood to be a way of knowing persons, not persons as how they might act in the Aristotelian sense, but the moral quality of the authors composing the poetry. Most importantly, in this process of knowing authors, the audience’s personality can be transformed by an incitement of their affections (情) to reshape them into the paradigmatic intentions (志) embedded in the songs. “Poetic Knowledge” From this comparative perspective of the formulation of explicit poetics, how poetry was created and the intellectual status of poetic creation, was what essentially distinguished the two modes of “poetic knowledge” in Greece and China: whereas in China poetry has access to knowledge through a rationalizing process of turning incitement into an indicative model of correlation between the internal and the external, in Greece poetry does so through a rationalizing process of turning inspiration into a mimetic model of representing truth and being. It is this difference that essentially defines the “poetic knowledge” constructed at the origins of the explicit poetics in each culture.