Poetry

From an observation by the poet Paul Valéry, I argue that rhyme schemes, while constraining, also enable the poet to achieve autonomy from various surrounding influences, such as the domestic and the political. The demand to keep to the rhyme scheme takes priority, reducing the likelihood of these dominating.

There is a novel which presents a general scheme for the development of a poet but this paper presents a problem for it. The problem is: can a believer in the scheme both account for the universality of some poets and the association it makes between poetry and revolutions?

In his 1968 poetry collection „Fadensonnen“, Paul Celan offers a hermetic blend of existentialism and mysticism, which is unusual in two respects. Firstly, the European philosophy of existence, especially with its proponents Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, had gone to great lengths to criticize and delegitimize the Abrahametic religions, for the concept of god seemed to be an obstacle to humanity in pursuit of its own humanization. Secondly, in the aftermath of the holocaust, the idea of man wanting (...) to merge with a god that had not prevented this cruelty from happening had lost much of its plausibility. Despite these two objections, Celan's poems address the struggle of togetherness in a world that negates the mere possibility of otherness, trying to salvage the unique identity and dignity of the other. With this in mind, the modus operandi of his poems is that of a butcher: Whatever has previously been alive – before the Shoah – now has to be stripped bare of its layers of individual and collective history, has to become less than body and flesh. In this way, the poems' inherent pain and misery transform the reader into a nobody, for only a nobody has got the prerequisites to encounter other people unbiasedly in their unique wholeness. Within this space of encounter, only the reminiscence of body and sexuality exists, commemorating the other, so that radical corporeality seems to be the prerequisite for togetherness. In this ahistorical sphere there is no room for a god that permitted the holocaust, redefining mysticism as the connection between men instead of one between man and god. Celan's poems act as a catalyst, for they exclude god from the spheres of man, making poetry a memorial site to the dead and the ones living in pain. This way, the poems are trying to save Eros (in the sense of creaturely love) from being mutilated by the crimes of European history while at the same time aiming at rehabilitating mankind in a post-holocaust world. (shrink)

Poetry, it is said, can reveal truth. Yet despite the best efforts of philosophers and poets to describe this truth, very few understand what kinds of truth poetry can convey.* One fact seems clear: only a few of the truths of poetry can be captured equally well in prose. Poetry also conveys truths of a different kind — truths that seem to exist on a level entirely different level from that of ordinary, factual truth. Some poems try to teach moral (...) or practical lessons that also could be stated in prose.* But this is not the kind of truth that puzzles philosophers and critics. Poetry also can tell another kind of truth — a truth that may be mystifying to scholars, but that is well known to anyone who becomes acquainted with poetry in an intimate way. This kind of truth cannot be spoken of or contemplated on the same terms as ordinary fact. What is the nature of this strange, yet familiar kind of knowledge that poetry can bring to the human mind? (shrink)

In this article, I offer a new philosophical interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid, dually centered on the queens of Olympus and Carthage. More specifically, I show how the philosopher-poet Virgil deploys Dido’s Junonian furor as the Aristotelian matter of the unjust Roman imperium, the feminist counterforce to the patriarchal force disguised as peaceful order. The first section explores Virgil’s political and biographical background for the raw materials for a feminist, anti-imperial political philosophy. The second section, following Marilynn Desmond, situates the continuing (...) misogynist condemnation of Virgil’s two goddess-queens in the context of their honored centrality in Roman and Carthaginian culture. The third section reinterprets Virgil’s goddess-queens as agents of furor as (apparently mad) feminist counterforce to the (actually mad) unjust force of the Roman empire and its agents Jupiter and Aeneas. The fourth section translates these poetic philosophical interpretations into prose, arguing that Dido’s Junonian furor is the Aristotelian matter constituting the unjust forms of Roman imperium. And the conclusion applies the latter analysis to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, suggesting Dido as a model for the “multitude” in the fight against the imperial injustice of today’s globalized empire. (shrink)

In the opening lines of ‘Black Orpheus’, written as a preface to an anthology of negritude poetry, Sartre challenges white readers ‘to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen’. Reading this poetry, he thinks, should undermine white people’s presumption of the objectivity of their perspective. Accordingly, the essay itself contradicts two prominent aspects of the philosophy he had so far developed: the idea that poetry could not be politically engaged; and the theory of radical freedom. These changes are (...) ultimately rooted in his realisation, upon reading this poetry, that his previous understanding of prose is mistaken. This has the consequence that his philosophical method, which derives ontological conclusions from prose descriptions of experience, has two important limitations: its premises cannot be drawn solely from his own experience; and French prose might be insufficient for formulating all relevant premises. He therefore revises his method to deploy this poetry as phenomenological grounds for ontological conclusions, which transforms his ontology of human existence to include cultural inheritance as a primary feature. We will see how this reading of negritude poetry exemplifies both the epistemic challenge involved in what he calls ‘the look’ and the use of listening in response to it. (shrink)

Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” tackles the subject of mortality with technical facility and unsparing candour. It has a reputation for profoundly affecting its readers. Yet poets Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz think “Aubade” is bad for us and for poetry: it lures us into the underworld and traps us there, and betrays poetry’s purpose by transcribing rather than transforming the depressing facts of reality. Philosophers, however, quite like it. “Aubade” crops up repeatedly in contemporary philosophy of death. I examine the (...) various appeals that philosophers have made to Larkin’s poem with a view to drawing out subtleties in the poem and the philosophical texts, before turning my attention to broader questions of its merit. At first glance, philosophy’s affinity for “Aubade” may seem to confirm Heaney and Milosz’s contention that the poem is somehow against poetry and on the side of “reason, science, and science-inspired philosophy” (Milosz). I argue that the philosophical uses of the poem help to undercut if not entirely dissolve Heaney and Milosz’s polarising efforts; they are mistaken in their views about the different purposes of poetry and philosophy, but there is some philosophical support for their commitment to averting mortal despair. (shrink)

Stefano Arduini es catedrático de Lingüística en la Universidad de Roma Link Campus, donde es Presidente del Departamento de Licenciatura en Artes, Música y Artes Escénicas y Prorector para la Tercera Misión. Ha enseñado Lingüística General y Teoría de la Traducción en la Universidad de Urbino; Lingüística en la Universidad de Estudios Internacionales de Roma y en la Universidad de Módena; y Literatura Comparada en la Universidad de Alicante y en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Desde 2005 es profesor honorario (...) de la Universidad Nacional San Marcos de Lima (Perú). A su vez, es miembro del Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship de Filadelfia, del Comité de Política de Traducción (COTP) de las Sociedades Bíblicas Unidas y del Sodalizio Glottologico Milanese. En 2012, a propuesta de la Junta Directiva, fue nombrado Miembro Honorario de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Retórica. Por otro lado, ha impartido cursos y seminarios en Bélgica, España, Estados Unidos, Francia, Gran Bretaña, Grecia, Holanda, Perú, Portugal, Rusia y Turquía, y es uno de los fundadores de la revista Translation. A Transdisciplnary Journal. Tiene en su haber más de un centenar de publicaciones, entre las que destacan: Prolegómenos a una teoría general de las figuras, Murcia University Press 2000; La Ragione retorica, Guaraldi 2004, Metaphors, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 2007; Manuale di traduzione, Carocci 2007; Paradoxes, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 2011; Con gli occhi dell’altro. Tradurre, Jaca Book 2020 (traducción al ruso 2021, traducción al inglés en curso); Traduzioni in cerca di un originale. La Bibbia e i suoi traduttori, Jaca Book 2021. Traductor de Juan de la Cruz, comenzó con Qohelet, la traducción de las Cinco Meguilot (Qohelet, Rut, Cantar de los Cantares, Lamentaciones, Ester). (shrink)

Esta entrevista se realizó de forma virtual y audiovisual el 3 de julio de 2021.

Poems are not the only things we sometimes call poetic. We experience as poetic also prose passages, as well as films, music, visual art, and even occurrences in daily life. But what is it exactly for something to be poetic in this wider sense? Discussion of the poetic in this sense is virtually nonexistent in the extant analytic literature. The aim of this article is to get a start on trying to come to grips with this phenomenon—the poetic as an (...) aesthetic category that outruns poetry as an art form. It proposes an initial sketch of an account in terms of the fittingness of certain affective reactions to artworks and other things, reactions featuring notably elements of tenderness and elevation. (shrink)

Poetry evokes mental imagery in its readers. But how is mental imagery precisely related to poetry? This article provides a systematic treatment. It clarifies two roles of mental imagery in relation to poetry—as an effect generated by poetry and as an efficient means for understanding and appreciating poetry. The article also relates mental imagery to the discussion on the ‘heresy of paraphrase’. It argues against the orthodox view that the imagistic effects of poetry cannot be captured by prosaic paraphrase, but (...) points to features of poetry that can shape aspects of mental imagery that are liable to be lost in paraphrase. (shrink)

Convergindo para uma existência em si irredutível às condições histórico-culturais e aos seus limites, ao ser humano em sua infância enquanto arquétipo refém do sonho e senhor da solidão se impõe o devaneio que envolve o transcendente como telos em uma experiência de “iluminação” cujo caráter dizível, na rememoração enquanto vivência do fenômeno primordial, somente se torna possível nas fronteiras mítico-poéticas e na correspondência dialética envolvendo memória e imaginação em uma construção epistêmico-simbólico-existencial que encerra como fundamento a concepção baseada na (...) perspectiva de Gaston Bachelard de que “um excesso de infância é um germe de poema”. Implicando o transcendente como telos na autoafirmação que perpassa desde o outrora até o “por-vir”, o devaneio constitui o locus da consciência da liberdade em um movimento de auto-expressão que guarda raízes no fundo da memória e na inata beleza da infância enquanto impulso vital que se sobrepõe ao paradoxo da existência enquanto acontecimento passível de produção volitiva e domínio intelectual, convergindo para a experiência epistêmico-simbólico-existencial envolvendo a condição humana de habitat de uma infância enquanto infância potencial em um processo irredutível a sua realidade concreta histórico-cultural que no onírico como modus essendi dialoga com o tópos autobiográfico e mítico-poético, guardando-se no “entre” que acena com as fronteiras do intra-histórico e intra-lendário. Nesta perspectiva, baseado na noção envolvendo infância potencial em um movimento epistêmico-simbólico-existencial que converge para as fronteiras que encerram como paradigma hermenêutico o Começo Primordial, Munguengue se torna o nome do devaneio na construção mítico-poética do Professor-Pesquisador Luiz Carlos Mariano Da Rosa em um processo irredutível a sua realidade concreta histórico-cultural que envolve o transcendente como telos na autoafirmação que perpassa desde o outrora até o “por-vir”. Implicando a iluminação enquanto instante de existência mítico-poética, Munguengue se sobrepõe ás idealizações das recordações da infância e à relação de causa e efeito do processo, encerrando um núcleo de infância que perdura na alma enquanto fenômeno que escapa às fronteiras da hermenêutica lógico-racional da realidade prático-objetiva e converge para a realidade subjetivo-existencial e o seu caráter vital de um animus indômito em um movimento que dialoga com o tópos autobiográfico e mítico-poético, guardando-se no “entre” que acena com as fronteiras do intra-histórico e intra-lendário. (shrink)

Esta entrevista retoma la experiencia de enseñanza de la profesora María Luisa Roel en función de la producción literaria de España. El objetivo es interiorizar sobre cómo esta se ha transferido en el ámbito de educación universitaria. A partir de la trayectoria de la docente, se brinda un panorama de cómo los estudiantes de la carrera profesional de Literatura acatan el conocimiento y la lectura de autores españoles, como Miguel de Cervantes. De igual forma, se mencionan dos momentos históricos en (...) los que se vería la presencia o la ausencia de esta producción: en la Literatura del Virreinato y la creación literaria contemporánea. (shrink)

Este artículo se enfoca en tres poemas del escritor peruano Jorge Eduardo Eielson. La adscripción conveniente para efectuarla se basa en las categorías fluctuadas de la retórica general textual, que ejercen una taxonomía que comprende múltiples figuras retóricas según coincidencias temáticas y axiomáticas. Para este caso, en una primera instancia, recurro al concepto de los campos figurativos, que desarrolla Stefano Arduini. Luego, retomo el paradigma de Pierre Fontanier en torno a la tipología de figuras. Para finiquitar, opto por la adquisición (...) de la metáfora orientacional, fundamentada por Lakoff y Johnson. El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar un análisis pormenorizado, supeditado a cada propuesta mencionada. Así, se explicarán las distintas percepciones que se extraen de la cosmovisión del autor. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como propósito corroborar la cosmovisión de Octavio Paz, a partir de la inacción de la sociedad cotidiana, que es notoria en un fragmento del poema “Máscaras del alba” de La estación violenta (1958). Su crítica contra el sistema por la ausencia de compromiso social y político revela dos conceptos que fundamenta Mijaíl Bajtín en Estética de la creación verbal: su intencionalidad como autor y la expresión concomitante en función del género discursivo empleado. Para comprobar estas dos premisas, (...) incluiré como instrumento metodológico los campos figurativos o las provincias figurales que aborda Stefano Arduini, que comprenden los tropos de la metáfora, la metonimia, la sinécdoque, la metonimia, la elipsis, la antítesis y la repetición, además de sus variaciones. (shrink)

Appearing for the first time in English, Art and the Working Class is the work of Alexander Bogdanov, a revolutionary polymath and co-founder, with Vladimir Lenin, of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Bogdanov was a strong proponent of the arts, co-founding the Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) organization to provide political and artistic education to workers. In this book, Bogdanov discusses the origins of art, its class characteristics, and how it might be created within a revolutionary socialist (...) context. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibilities of using character education through poetry to cultivate virtue in a secondary-school context. It focuses on the philosophical assumptions behind the intervention development and some implications of the intervention. We explore character education and poetry teaching as a tool for moral reasoning through the means of the method of ‘poetic inquiry,’ drawing also on insights from Wittgenstein. Character education and ‘poetic inquiry’ share similar goals, but are not harmonious as far as theory and methodology goes. (...) It clearly matters what exactly is to be cultivated, and in this paper we show that ‘poetic inquiry’ and character education, if used to foster practical reasoning, can be used as a means of ethical-cum-emotional self-cultivation. What makes both these case-specific approaches effective, and to some extent unique, is the possible employment of creative writing, and the development of the intellectual virtue of creative critical thinking. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of bees in Dickinson’s work, most interpreters denigrate her nature poems. But following several recent scholars, I identify Nietzschean/Dionysian overtones in the bee poems and suggest the figure of bees/hive/queen illuminates as feminist key to her corpus. First, (a) the bee’s sting represents martyred death; (b) its gold, immortality; (c) its tongue, the “lesbian phallus”; (d) its wings, poetic power; (e) its buzz, poetic melody, and (f) its organism, a joyful Dionysian Susan (her sister-in-law and love interest) (...) to Emily’s flower. Second, the hive represents her individual poems (with slants/dashes as stingers, wings as hymn meter, honey as rhymes, variant words as exiled bees, and accompanying flowers their Darwinian coevolution with bees), constituting her writing persona as a multi-voiced self-swarm, as organized in the apiary of her letters and fascicles. And third, the queen represents her Western cultural and religious inheritance wherein bees are symbols of the soul, reincarnation, poetic-philosophical vocation, and a Nietzschean, trans-Dionysian naturalist ontology—symbolized by apiarian Artemis. (shrink)

This study shows how George Eliot, a leader in the nineteenth-century intellectual world of Darwin and the Industrial Revolution, wrestled in her early novels with the esthetic problems of reconciling her art and her philosophy. Attempting in her fiction to reproduce the real, temporal world she lived in, George Eliot also tried to reassure herself and her readers that their godless modern world still operated according to higher moral laws of justice and perfectibility. U. C. Knoepflmacher examines here for the (...) first time in sequence George Eliot's development of increasingly sophisticated forms of fiction in her efforts to reconcile the two conflicting orientations in her thought. We see this popular novelist as she progressed artistically from the flawed "Amos Barton" in 1857 up to the balance she achieved in Silas Marner in 1861. And we discover her in the context of her literary antecedents and surrounding in a way that brings many new affiliations to light, particularly the connection of her novels to the writings of Milton, the Romantic poets, and her contemporaries Arnold and Carlyle. Professor Knoepflmacher thoroughly discusses each work in George Eliot's first stage, brining new attention to minor works like "The Lifted Veil" and Scenes of Clerical Life and fresh insights to such well known works as Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968. (shrink)

Do logical paradoxes, like Eubulides’s Liar Paradox (the claim that the sentence “I am now lying” is true if and only if it is false), have any “existential” significance or are they mere brain puzzles for the mathematically minded? The paper argues that Randall Jarrell’s poem, “Eighth Air Force”, contains a poetic use of Eubulides’ Liar Paradox, spoken by Pontius Pilate’s wife in her statements about the “murder” of Jesus, in order to capture, symbolically, the inherent universal duplicity (inauthenticity) of (...) human life, specifically, the fact that human life, even in its true statements about fundamental moral-existential issues, is an inseparable blend of “truth” and “lies.”. (shrink)

Connecting poetry and philosophy of language, Philip Mills bridges the continental and analytical divide by bringing together the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Through an expressivist philosophy of poetry, he argues that we can understand some of the core questions in the philosophy of language. Mills highlights the continuity of poetic language with ordinary language, and positions Nietzsche and Wittgenstein's thinking as the clearest way to expand the philosophy of poetry. By tracing the expressivist tradition of philosophy of language, this (...) study locates its roots in German Romanticism right through to the work of contemporary expressivists such as Huw Price and Robert Brandom. Where poetry has been difficult to grasp with the traditional philosophical tools used by aestheticians, A Poetic Philosophy of Language operates at the crossroads between philosophy of art and language, proposing a new philosophy of poetry with wide-ranging potentialities. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

There is a long-standing debate about whether poetry can make a substantive contribution to philosophy with compelling arguments to show that poetry and philosophy involve distinct modes of thought and aims, albeit with similar concerns. This paper argues that reading lyric poetry can play a substantive role in philosophy by helping the philosopher understand how to forge connections with the perspectives of others. The paper takes the view that poetry is not directly philosophical but can play an important role in (...) developing the philosopher's awareness of how perspective shapes beliefs and thought processes. Following Robert Nozick, David Lewis, and Helen Beebee, it argues for the need to broaden our conception of the aims of philosophy beyond aiming for conclusive proof, at the least where philosophical inquiry is focused on questions of value. It then shows how poetry cultivates an intellectual virtue essential to philosophy aimed at uncovering equilibria and collective understanding. (shrink)

The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition FREEMANMARGARET H.oup. 2020. pp. 216. £64.00.

I propose a critique of Heidegger’s poetics, and show that poetic critique of Heidegger is also philosophical critique on Lévinasian lines. I identify an obsessional erasure of absence in Heidegger’s poetics, a neglect of the immemorial other. Lévinas frames this critique through Valéry’s Eupalinos, a dialogue of an immemorial Socrates, in Limbo after his own death, praising architecture over his own, lost, philosophy. Separating poetics from ontology, Lévinas’s immemorial acknowledges irrecuperable traces, murmurs, or echoes of alterity; poetry, as commemoration, marks (...) the distance between loss and absence. This contrasts with Heidegger’s eulogy of Max Scheler and its echo in the Gedachtes, metaphysical and poetic monuments that seek an incompletable divorce from sensation and persons. I present Mark Doty’s elegy Atlantis as an illustration of Lévinas’s central philosophical critique of Heidegger’s thinking of death and persons. Atlantis embodies the immemorial; architecture alive with sound, an impossible city populated by absence. (shrink)

This article proposes that oral performance could be a philosophical activity in early China. The focus is on the Huainanzi, a densely rhymed philosophical treatise compiled by Liu An in the second century b.c.e. I show that the tome contains various sound-correlated poetic forms that are intended not only to enable textual performance but also, by means of aural mimesis, to encourage the intuitive understanding of its philosophical messages. Thus scholars of ancient poetry, philosophy, or intellectual history, despite being habituated (...) to reading silently and observing disciplinary boundaries, should be attentive to these sonic patterns in order to do justice to the poetic-cum-philosophical richness and originality of this text. More importantly, I argue that these poetic forms enable readers and audiences to experience, embody, and, above all, enact the Way through textual performance. Thanks to the sound patterns of the Huainanzi, the somatic processes of aural reading and philosophical praxis can occur simultaneously. Vocalization becomes an actionable and repeatable spiritual exercise, which facilitates the intuitive understanding and internalization of philosophical values. In other words, the perennial knowing–doing gap is heroically closed by the Huainanzi. / 淮南子的文本聲景：早期中國的詩歌、表演、哲學與實踐 / 王棕琦 / 本文論證早期中國的文本表演可以是一種具創造性的哲學活動，而非只是以聲音演繹書寫文本的朗讀活動。文中首先指出《淮南子》裏跟聲音有關的詩歌形式不但有助朗誦表演，更能讓讀者直觀感悟書中哲學思想而不落言筌。而 且，這些詩歌形式更讓讀者通過朗讀而實踐、內化書中所述之大道。可以說，《淮南子》對中國哲學的一大貢獻在於它將「知道」、「傳道」和「行道」三者合而為一。. (shrink)