The relationship between poetry and philosophy is ineluctable (unavoidable and inescapable) and widely understood. Although in this blog post we won’t go as far as to claim, like Coleridge, that a poet and a philosopher are the same, we will, however, draw attention to the opportunities poetry and poetic inquiry offer and how these opportunities can underpin the work of philosophy and research methodology. This blog post provides context for a BERA Conference 2024 and WERA Focal Meeting Symposium titled ‘At the Intersection of Philosophy and Poetic Inquiry’.

Poetry and philosophy overlap in many areas. Poetry is concerned with the exploration of human experience: the physical and metaphysical world, issues of ethics and morality, universal questions about existence, knowledge and meaning; reaching for transcendental or universal truths; and so does philosophy. Poetry and philosophy both place a high value on the precise use of language: philosophers strive for clarity and rigour in their arguments, while poets often seek to evoke emotions and imagery. Both use metaphor, ambiguity and symbolism to convey meanings and appreciate the power of form to convey complex ideas, emotions and aesthetics. There is a tradition of philosophical poetry, where poets explicitly engage with philosophical ideas. Examples include the works of John Milton, who explored themes of free will and divine justice, and Wallace Stevens, who contemplated the nature of reality and imagination. Several philosophers have also been poets, contributing significantly to both fields. Notable examples include Plato (c. 427–347 BCE), Rumi (1207–1273), the Indian polymath, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the Portuguese poet whose work blends poetry with existential and metaphysical themes, T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), and Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) the Lebanese writer, poet and philosopher best known for The Prophet.

‘Poetry and philosophy both place a high value on the precise use of language: philosophers strive for clarity and rigour in their arguments, while poets often seek to evoke emotions and imagery.’

Although the focus of our individual research is different, each of us embodies the practices of turning to poetic methodologies to respond to philosophical questions and applying philosophical perspectives to inform poetic inquiry. Pithouse-Morgan and her colleagues, Daisy Pillay and Inbanathan Naicker, harness poetry’s power for reflexive thinking and knowing to explore how Ubuntu – an indigenous Southern African philosophy of interdependence – can enhance social cohesiveness and justice in higher education. Intertwining Ubuntu with the ‘productive ambiguity’ (Eisner, 1997) of poetry, opens up methodological and epistemic possibilities for fostering complex, multifaceted understandings of social cohesiveness and justice, offering a productive resistance to segregated and exclusionary higher education (in South Africa and elsewhere), as illustrated in the first stanza of the poem ‘Methodological Inventiveness and Poetic Knowing’:

The method is critical, different, fluid,
Illuminating our stories in theirs:
Entangled, evocative, imaginative,
Evolving, unfinished, provisional.

Smith’s doctoral inquiry with mothers of disabled children was underpinned by Blanchot’s idea of infinite conversation as ‘plural speech’ (see Bojesen, 2018), where withness is prioritised over aboutness. The evocation of the magic of poetry draws attention to everyday experiences of inclusion and exclusion in a way that is haunting and affective ‘that bit of otherness about us’, as a poem by one mother states. The result is a rhizomatic dance between expression and movement of thought where new feelings and understandings can emerge from existing data and maternal recollections.

For Ekpo, the idea of the self as craftsmanship is exemplified in the use of poetic forms to articulate and represent the self. Her work centres around the notion of critical authenticity, a concept which allows for an existential response that emanates from one’s confrontation with tensions in the relationship between oneself and one’s world, and the speaking in-to-being of ideas and actions geared towards navigating beyond binary definitions of self. Critical authenticity is understood as the careful exploration, understanding and articulation of self, and follows Foucault’s discussion of the self as a work of art (see Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982), exploring how such art, could act as ‘an effective tool to talk back to power’ (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxxviii), and how it can help to ‘expose, highlight and undermine power’ (Leggo, 2008, p. 167).

As Leggo ((2008, p. 167) ) states, poetry ‘creates textual spaces that invite and create ways of knowing and becoming in the world’. Bringing together philosophical inquiry and poetic inquiry enables new knowledge to emerge that might otherwise remain unseen and unheard. In each of the inquiries mentioned above, this methodological approach was employed to draw attention to power, exclusion and oppression. Poetry can infuse philosophical inquiry with creative potential, to move beyond what is already known.

References

Bojesen, E. (2018). Conversation as educational research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(6), 650–659. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1508995

Dreyfus, H. L., & Rabinow, P. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Routledge.

Eisner, E. W. (1997). The promise and perils of alternative forms of data representation. Educational Researcher, 26(6), 4–10. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X026006004

Faulkner, S. L. (2007). Concern with craft: Using ars poetica as criteria for reading research poetry. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(2), 218–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800406295636

Leggo, C. (2008). Astonishing silence: Knowing in poetry. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research (pp. 165-174). SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226545.n14

Prendergast, M. (2009). Introduction: The phenomena of poetry in research. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences (pp. xix–xlii). Sense Publishers.