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.

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 second basis is that although the songs were a heterogeneous body of poetry, the Ruists insisted on their uniform character, most crucially in what constituted the poetic experience. This experience is encapsulated in the Major Preface to Mao’s edition of the Songs, which, as we will see, can be considered the end-product of this tradition. [10] Purporting to set forth the commentator’s understanding of the purpose of the canon as a whole, it describes the process by which poetry is first produced and the function it performs: 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 Thus, in true poetry, the walls that separate subject and object, self and other, nature and culture, language and reality, the Real (al-Ĥaqq) / ultimate reality / Self and creation ( al-khalq) / conventional reality / self are porous (if they can be said to exist at all), leading to a distinct form of “poetic knowledge” that is clearly described by Bashō: Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one—when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit. 68Rhythm: 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”. 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.

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. And “Whatever mate you desire, go! Become obliterated in your Beloved! Assume the same shape and attributes!” 80 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.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] Scientific progress, Césaire would call “impoverished knowledge” that can only give us an “impoverished man.” As for Kantian philosophy, Césaire would write, “the asylum keepers are all there. And singularly limiting.” But Césaire would go further. By contrast to scientific knowledge or Western conventional rationality, Césaire wrote, it is only the revolutionary image that allows man to break through the limits:

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?

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: 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] Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is perhaps the most famous of the five Odes which Keats composed in 1819. Meditating on the mute form of a vase from classical antiquity, Keats tries to discover what it means and realises, in words that have become celebrated, that the vase itself appears to offer up the answer and say: ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, and this is all we need to know: Negative Capability, in other words … Bachir Diagne, intervention at Nietzsche 6/13 here: https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/nietzsche1313/6-13/. 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.Early Chinese explicit poetics developed in the context of the Ruist work of transmitting the canons, especially the Songs. A group of intellectuals called Ru were dedicated to the study of the primordial body of learning, and they ascribed to Confucius the role of the cultural bearer who took over the primeval division of learning into Six Disciplines or Six Arts, of which the Songs were considered to form the basis. We see how Confucius is presented to explore the various dimensions of the Songs throughout the many layers of the Analects. [8] His overall object is to appropriate the Songs from their rhetorical and diplomatic uses predominant at the time (the so-called fushi practice exemplified in the Zuozhuan) to fit them into an all-embracing philosophical program of the Six Arts, which comprise the true Way. As a result of his canonical collection of the Three Hundred Songs (later known as the Classic of Songs), almost all other earlier poems were displaced, so in the time of the early Ruists to speak of poetry was tantamount to speaking of the Songs. The first basis for the study of Chinese explicit poetics is the fact that songs and their collection into a canon were indistinguishable. Poetry was understood paradigmatically, if not exclusively, in terms of the Classic of Songs. [9]