poetic thinking

is defined negatively as benjamin's genre of thinking which is not that of the scholar, the philologist, the writer, or the literary critic.

Hannah Arendt coined the term 'poetic thinking' in her essay on Walter Benjamin. Her catchy formulation is explained in a series of negative characterizations. To fundamentally comprehend Benjamin, according to Arendt, one must understand that he was 'very scholarly, but in no way a scholar... that his major subject was text and the interpretation of texts, but that he was no philologist... [ ] that he was a writer whose greatest ambition was to build a text entirely comprised of quotes from other texts that is, to override his own role as writer... [ ] he published countless book reviews and many conventional essays on dead and contemporary writers and poets, but he was no literary critic.' The list is much longer in the original, but it continues in the same vein: Benjamin doesn't belong to any discipline nor profession... readers need to understand that he 'thought

is reflective of non-reflective, non-theoretical understanding.

To anticipate, such non-reflective, non-theoretical understanding is the element of poetic language, e.g. how, for instance, would AI model Sophocles’ line, in the dramatist T om Stoppard’ s version: ‘Love, said Sophocles, is like the ice held in the hand by children’ (Stoppard 1997: 43)?)

poetic thinking, n.All

poetic thinking