This is a very silly and pretentious note but whatever. [[Percy Shelley]] has three interesting quotations from his [[Shelley 1840 - A Defense of Poetry|Defense of Poetry]] that are... dialectical. I'll go through them. <hr> ### The centre and circumference > "Poetry is indeed something divine. ==It is at once the [[centre and circumference|centre and circumference]] of knowledge==" ([[Shelley 1840 - A Defense of Poetry|Defense]], 47). Compare this to the importance of [[dialectics#The part and the whole|the part and the whole in dialectics]]. The particular can only be understood as part of a larger whole; the two exist together and can only be understood as such. In Hegelian dialectics, the dance between [[particular and universal|particular and universal]] (the dance between the individual subject and... everything else) is explicitly very fundamental to the dialectic. It actually makes a lot of sense for Shelley to be thinking about this, since he was writing around the same time as [[G.W.F. Hegel|Hegel]]. (You can see the overlap of philosophic [[Romanticism]] and the movement's poetry in, for example, [[Romantic Irony]].) <br> ### Imagining "that which we know" > "==**We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know**==; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest” ([[Shelley 1840 - A Defense of Poetry|Defense]], 45). Compare this to [[Slavoj Žižek]]'s concept of [[unknown known]]s: things we know, but we don't know that we know them. This is, for Žižek, a way of thinking about the [[unconscious]]. It's very similar to the [[fish in water]] idea. <br> ### The future in the present > “For [the poet] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but ==**he beholds the future in the present**==, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time” ([[Shelley 1840 - A Defense of Poetry|Defense]], 7). Compare this to the [[Marx's style and dialectic emphasizes flux, change and process|importance of process and the dialectic]] (and the part/whole thing, mentioned above). The future end of capitalism, for example, is baked into its present. <hr> ## Okay, so what? For Shelley, there's something about poetry that almost thinks dialectically. What is it? I think [[Derek Attridge]]'s [[Singularity of Literature (2004)]] actually gets to some of this, in terms of how poetry uses the cultural materials of the "present" and refigures or rearranges them to see... something. > “The creative writer registers, whether consciously or unconsciously, both the possibilities offered by the accepted forms and materials of the time, and their impossibilities, the exclusions and [end p. 20] prohibitions that have sustained but also limited them” ([[Singularity of Literature (2004)|Singularity]], 20-21). Those possibilities allow the poet to work with the tenions and contradictions of the existing cultural materials. They're able to zero in on some small [[particular and universal|particular]] [[concrete detail|detail]] or small-*t* "truth" (the center) that speaks to or better relates to the larger "whole"[^Hegel] than our existing materials do. Our existing materials, by contrast, veer into [[cliché]] and other trite, pre-known, largely unconscious formulations—i.e., things we know, but we don't know that we know them. There's something about this that goes beyond just [[defamiliarization]] (though I haven't yet succeeded in articulating clearly why). The poet takes these and reveals their individual contradictions (the centre), and expands outwards from there (the circumference). And.. *that's the dialectic, baby. Eyyyy.* [^Hegel]: Whole is acting here as a synonym for the Hegelian Absolute, which, yeah, fits for the dialectic dance between the All, the non-All and... all that.