What and How Are Poets for in Our Age of Want: Cognition, Emancipation, Communism

Poetry is approached as topological cognition, with its furthest horizon being communism. In alienated times, the poet-creator participates in politics as an antipolitics, by suturing conceptual thought to immediate sensual experiences. The author develops this horizon by emancipatory examples from Bertolt Brecht's theory, Friedrich Hölderlin's verse, and Franco Fortini's criticism. From Arthur Rimbaud on poetry is freedom as possibility of things being otherwise, a swerve from and against the dominant lore.