Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education

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Césaire’s dialogue with Nietzsche would extend far beyond his 1944 manifesto “Poetry and Knowledge” to his later plays and poems, such as And the Dogs Kept Quiet, for which The Birth of Tragedy as noted earlier was his “breviary,” and A Season in the Congo, published in 1966. As Bachir Diagne writes of the latter: 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. » As learners read a poem aloud, they begin to pay more attention to the sounds of words and how meaning can change depending on how a line is spoken. Unlike some other reading exercises, the rhythm and rhyme of poetry are fun for children to say, and this encourages them to enjoy speaking in front of a class. Aimé Césaire, « Poésie et connaissance, » in Tropiques. Revue Culturelle. No. 12, Janvier 1945, pp. 163. 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.

Each organiser contains a number of detailed, clear, and colourful sections explaining the key elements of the poem: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. Figure of speech: describing things in a non-literal way, such as a simile or a hyperbole. The metaphor, where one thing is compared to something unfamiliar, is one of the most essential aspects of a poem, and you will be able to find many examples of this, such as the phrase “heart of gold” - the heart is not literally made of gold, but this figure of speech uses “gold” to attribute value to the heart, implying someone is a good person.

An important way to help learners understand poems is to have them write their own definitions of poetry. By contrast, in the cultural process of formulating an explicit poetics in early China, poetry as exemplified by the Classic of Songs was early on firmly integrated into the Six Arts, and never posed any competitive challenge to its overall structure of knowledge. Poetry was not a primary means of transmitting knowledge otherwise inaccessible; rather, the main concern was how to regulate the effective power of poetry, and so historicizing and moralizing exegesis was invented in support of an explicit poetics to exploit a “poetic knowledge” of the authors. As we saw, the earliest Chinese literary thought conceived of poetry as an incitement to resolve the inner stirrings of the mind and to channel them into the verbalization of the intent. Therefore, in the Ruist tradition from Confucius to the Major Preface, an indicative model of “poetic knowledge” was constructed to direct at the inner state of the person who composed or performed poetry. This “knowledge” was appropriated in the canonizing process of the Songs to be measured more and more by the external criteria of moral and political propriety, not by any intrinsic qualities of the poetry.

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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. See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Négritude”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/negritude. Nietzsche took a similar view of the uni-dimensionality of science. “A ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world as you understand it might consequently still be one of the stupidest, that is to say, the most destitute of significance, of all possible world-interpretations,” Nietzsche exclaimed. Taking the example of music, he wrote: “Supposing we valued the worth of a music with reference to how much it could be counted, calculated, or formulated – how absurd such a ‘scientific’ estimate of music would be! What would one have apprehended, understood, or discerned in it! Nothing, absolutely nothing of what is really ‘music’ in it!” 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.

Césaire gives voice to the radical potential in Nietzsche’s writings on tragedy and poetics, a radical potential that would ultimately nourish an entire artistic and political movement, Négritude, and motivate decolonization. With Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), it would produce a unique combination of self-determination without nationalism or state sovereignty—a distinctive view of decolonization and democratic federation that Gary Wilder analyzes brilliantly under the rubric “Freedom Time.” [4] The figure of Patrice Lumumba in A Season in the Congo is indeed the tragic Nietzschean figure par excellence—betrayed by his military commander Joseph Mobutu [the character Mokutu in Césaire’s play] and by Western powers, assassinated and mutilated, sacrificed by a power structure that would simply reproduce itself in the post-colonial setting. Lumumba is the one who had sought to get beyond the morality of colonialism, above the partisan squabbles, above past histories—a kind of superman—but who ultimately is defeated by the Western power structure. Lumumba is Zarathustra at the end, right before he is shot, right before “The mercenary gives the killing thrust to Lumumba”:

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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.’ This exploration of context can help learners recognise the different uses of language, and how their poetic choices relate to experiences of war or race. This can also help explain the different ways language is used across time periods, from the 16th-century sonnets of Shakespeare to the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon during the First World War. 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.” 31

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. Encouraging learners’ confidence when reading aloud can motivate them to seek out poems on their own and, as they begin to read out loud more, their speech development often improves dramatically. Rhythm: the use of sound patterns to create an effect. This means putting more stress or emphasis on certain syllables as you read. A poem’s rhythm is also called its meter. A famous example of rhythm is iambic pentameter, which Shakespeare often uses in his plays and sonnets. This means each line has ten syllables with a repeating rhythm of “da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum”. 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. Fanon appeals to something that is beyond abstract political rights discourse. He appeals to his own body, something concrete and immediate. Fanon asks of his body not to allow him to be seduced by forms of being-in-the-world that normalize violence and dehumanization. Doubt can be linked to critique. In a society that hides beneath the seductions of normalization, critique is undesirable and deemed dangerous. Yet in our contemporary moment, the fulfillment of Fanon’s prayer is desperately needed.”

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As the poet Charles Upton explains, “Poetry… is not entertainment. It is not self-expression. It is not propaganda…. Poetry is a way of knowing based on the cultivation of symbolic, or anagogic, consciousness, expressed through the medium of human language. The games it plays are not sporting events but serious hunting expeditions carried out in the face of collective mass starvation.” 7Or in the words of Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.… Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.” 8But what is this poetic knowledge behind the meters and rhymes? Why is it so important? Why is it that so many of the best poets of most languages are so-called mystics? And what does it mean that some of us have lost touch with this poetic knowledge? The Qur’an, Poetry, Ineffability, and Wonder It is very remarkable that in the Poetics, Aristotle restricts both the scope and the substance of poetry under investigation to allow the mimetic model its full interpretive power. Only epic and dramatic poetry are taken into consideration, while the non-dramatic genres, such as elegy, iambos and various types of lyric poetry are ignored. Within this restricted scope, poetry or rather dramatic poetry, is to represent its true subject-matter, namely, “people in action”, how they would necessarily or probably speak and act. With human action constituting the province of poetry, much is excluded from poetry’s sphere of knowledge. From the poet’s purview of divine knowledge that encompasses “things that are, things that will be and things that were” to Aristotle’s “human action”, the whole realm of the divine now vanishes from sight. Furthermore, the poet is restricted to be a mimētēs, speaking not in his own person, but through his characters. Yet at the same time, the mimetic model is transformed philosophically into the basis for a poetic knowledge otherwise not accessible: the knowledge that we acquire from characters in the fictional world of dramatic mimesis. Knowing Authors This bears a strong resemblance to Goethe’s poetic/sc