Aimé Césaire: Poetry Is/and Knowledge

Abstract

Le mot, l'image, le mythe, l'emotion, l'humour, le mystere, le rythme 'the word, the image, myth, emotion, humor, mystery, rhythm,' these vocables are the building blocks of Aime Cesaire's poetics. They are first theorized in his essay Poesie et connaissance, published in the Martinican journal of poetry and cultural renewal, Tropiques , in 1944. My own essay reads Cesaire's writings on poetry, including other articles in Tropiques as well as his Lettre a Lilyan Kesteloot, with some of his earlier poems, including the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and those poetic texts published between 1941 and 1944 in Tropiques , to demonstrate the dialectical relationship that obtains between practice and theory. I suggest that it is in the poetry that the poetics is formulated, that the resulting knowledge is constitutive of the poet's identity, and therefore that the knowledge Cesaire is speaking about, the kind that poetry reveals, is self-knowledge. What this relationship enacts is the interface between ontology and epistemology.