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. Along with Wilde, Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) is perhaps the wittiest person whom everyone loves to quote. But unlike Wilde, Parker’s poetry was as witty as her conversation, and in ‘Wisdom’ she tells us why she’s giving up on love, because it’s the wise thing to do …

Like al-Jurjānī, Abhinavagupta describes in great detail the various linguistic and poetic features that produce this kind of heightened aesthetic experience, which he also associates with wonder, surprise, awe, and astonishment; 30he places greater emphasis on the psychological processes that create this elevated aesthetic experience through the unique power of evocative suggestion (dhvani), whose addition to the ordinary denotative functioning of language allows us to “squeeze the juice” out of words, savoring their expressions of the ineffable evoked in our consciousness. As one scholar summarizes Abhinavagupta’s theory: “When language serves art, it neither negates nor dispenses with linguistic apprehension. Rather, it delivers more than language can: the ineffable essence of the subject who experiences love, compassion, grief, the comic, and more, including quietude.” 31C’est par l’image, l’image révolutionnaire, l’image distante, l’image qui bouleverse toutes les lois de la pensée, que l’homme brise enfin la barrière. » 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 The Aristotelian notion is based most importantly on the celebrated passage in Chapter 9 of the Poetics. There Aristotle asserts that poetry is not about “events which have occurred, but of the kind of events which could occur, and are possible by the standards of probability or necessity” (1451a). [6] Compared with history, poetry is “more philosophical and more serious”, since it “speaks more of universals, history of particulars” (1451b). Add to it the requirement that on account of their fictional status mimetic works be evaluated not by external criteria, moral, political, and otherwise, but by its own, as Aristotle puts it in Chapter 25, “correct standards in poetry are not identical with those in politics ( politikē) or in any other particular art” (1460b13-15), we have the doctrine of “poetic universals”. What defines these “poetic universals” is possible or imaginary actions represented in poetry. Thus, poetry as a fictional world of men in action provides knowledge of general categories and types, which we may call characters, used by its audience to understand the world and human life.

It is in the poetic arts, in the Dionysian, that Césaire would draw much of the vitality and poetic knowledge necessary to resist colonial and Western domination. In this sense, Césaire’s writings demonstrate not only the influence of his early Nietzschean encounters, but rather how much more can be done—in a revolutionary way—with those early fragments and aphorisms. And so, it is to Césaire’s art form and creativity, his poetic knowledge and political practice, that we can turn to for our own inspiration and resistance in these dark times. This bears a strong resemblance to Goethe’s poetic/sc

And it is here that Césaire’s silent dialogue with Nietzsche was both formative and remains instructive. Like Nietzsche, Césaire “distrusted a priori approaches to knowledge and truth, whether idealist or materialist.” [14] It is precisely that kind of openness that would nourish both his radical poetics and his political commitments. Nietzsche’s anti-foundationalism would foster a vitality and creativity that would nourish Césaire’s writings and endeavors from the first issue of Tropiques [15] to his masterful later plays. It is the critique of Kantian philosophy and instrumental reason that would enable what Césaire referred to in 1944 as “poetic knowledge” and “poetic truth”: a “vitalist vision of recovery, reconciliation, and salvation through poetry.” [16] 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.’ At the outset of our comparative study, we do not adopt a rigid definition of “knowledge” currently used in modern philosophical discussion and map it onto the two ancient poetic traditions. Instead, we allow the Greek idea of epistēmē, eidenai, etc and the Chinese idea of 知（“to know, knowledge”) to be understood in their own conceptual framework and cultural context. On the Greek side, it is well known that early poets used poetry as a primary means of transmitting a set of transcendent knowledge and truth, inaccessible to other mortals, but accessible to the poets through the temporary state of divine possession. To represent this originary experience of poetry as inspiration Greek poets resorted in a variety of ways to the divine patronage of the Muses, and configured in a variety of ways their relations with these goddesses. Inspired by the Muses, the poet once claimed to sing of “things that are, things that will be and things that were” through the knowledge granted by Mnemosyne. [2] This is a divinatory omniscience, a knowledge that gives him access to “the essence of being”. [3] This status of the poet as “master of truth” and the nature of their “divine knowledge” turned out to be a vital philosophical problem in the competitive context of Greek culture, when other forms of knowledge evolved one after another from poetry. Philosophy, especially that of Plato and Aristotle, constructed an explicit poetics by exploring the various dimensions of mimesis in its competitive claim for knowledge and truth. In this context, the process of configuring the implicit poetics of the poets into the explicit poetics of the philosophers is not merely an attempt to account for a given tradition of poetic compositions, but rather a special way to compete with them and to eventually replace their authority. Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” p. v-xxiv, in Tropiques. 1941-1945 Collection Complète (Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1978), p. v. In the first issue of Tropiques, René Ménil drew on Nietzsche to discuss “the sphere of real art.” See Wilder, Freedom Time, p. 27.

Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics. Négritude is not a pretentious conception of the universe. It is a way of living history within history: the history of a community whose experience appears to be … unique, with its deportation of populations, its transfer of people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its fragments of murdered cultures. How can we not believe that all this, which has its own coherence, constitutes a heritage?At the end of September 1944, the French poet and playwright, Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), traveled from his native Martinique to Haiti to deliver a lecture at an international philosophical congress dedicated to the question of knowledge and held under the auspices of the Haitian and United States governments. [5] The gathering commemorated, in part, the work of “great thinkers” who had been overshadowed by the occupation of France and the Vichy government in the Antilles. In Port-au-Prince, the young poet, only thirty-one years old, an official delegate of the French government, would deliver a powerful and radical lecture, Poésie et connaissance [“Poetry and Knowledge”], that shook the conventional Kantian foundations of the assembled philosophers through a quiet dialogue with Nietzsche. Aimé Césaire’s encounter with Nietzsche—in his own words, one of his essential reference points alongside Baudelaire, Breton, Langston Hughes, and others [2]—nourished a vitality, an indignation, a passion for tragedy, for art, for knowledge and politics, in sum, a will to power that would enrich his poems and plays, but also propel his anti-colonialism and political struggles. Through multiple-choice questions, writing activities, gamified tasks and high-quality prose, learners explore and master the fundamental writing devices they need to thrive in GCSE English, both when analysing texts and when using writing techniques in their own writing. 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. It is here, though, that Aimé Césaire and others, like Frantz Fanon, who we will study later, offer such insight. And it is here that I will, then, end—at least for now. With George Yancy, who writes: