#poetic knowledge

[tonreihe]

“There is a poetic knowledge of the world, but it is not for knowledge or for knowing the world; it is for obscurely revealing to himself the creative subject, and fecundating him in his spiritual sources. If you pretend to use it for knowing, it vanishes in your hands.”

—Jacques Maritain, “The Experience of the Poet” (in Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, The Situation of Poetry)

[her-moth]

from Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley, 2003

You can easily find a pdf online <3

[insuspenseandincomplete]

This unconceptualizable knowledge comes about, I think, through the instrumentality of emotion, which, received in the preconscious life of the intellect, becomes intentional and intuitive and causes the intellect obscurely to grasp some existential reality as one with the Self it has moved, and by the same stroke all that which this reality, emotionally grasped, calls forth in the manner of a sign: so as to have the self known in the experience of the world and the world known in the experience of the self, through an intuition which essentially tends towards utterance and creation.

Jacques Maritain, “On Knowledge through Connaturality,” The Review of Metaphysics 4.4 (1951), 477.