According to the “Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” philosophy resolves itself into poetics at the end. Hölderlin elaborates this idea in his poetic fragments. The article describes the systematic impact of Hölderlin’s concept of „Wechsel der Töne“ on the act of composing poems. On the example of the seven keywords of an unwritten poem „Ovids Rükkehr nach Rom“, the article focusses on a specific metamorphosis: the one from a pure intellectual and pre-lingual realm into the lingual sphere of a concrete poem. Thereby it becomes clear that the way of thinking (in its pre-lingual sense) is poetic; the process of thinking transforms itself into a genuine poetic progress, and vice versa the structure of a poem turns out to be part of a creative development of thinking. By contrast, the described transformative process elucidates an impact of contemporary poetics, because transformation as a core issue is mostly only referred to linguistic, social, or cultural aspects.

This paper characterizes several ways of transferring knowledge via lyric poetry. It is argued that conveying information via schemata is a prevalent mode of that kind. But there are also others like employing a concise use of language or pointing at other texts using intertextual references. Besides, many poetry books establish some sort of a lyric sequence to further elaborate a certain topic. As information in lyric poetry is not only schematized, but also sketchy, from a critical reception point of view it may also be highlighted that recipients can make use of it as some kind of a template that enables them to gain new insights related to their own living environment. The important role of schemata as well as the other kinds of knowledge transfer specified in this paper are exemplified with reference to the contemporary poetry of ageing and with a special focus on several poems by Harald Hartung. As ageing is a process that becomes more and more important to western societies due to demographic development, the poetry of ageing and of old age in particular may serve as a tool for gaining knowledge and especially knowledge of what-it-is-like regarding that topic. This adds even more authority to the question of how knowledge is transferred via literature and lyric poetry in particular.

The paper gives a survey on the German tradition of didactic poems and nature poems from the 18 th century to the immediate present. The early modern pattern of nature as a peaceful Arcadia, the enlightenment pattern of nature reflecting God in every detail, and the romanticist pattern of nature that is impenetrable but nevertheless a permanent object of longing (“Sehnsucht”) are proved to be models of nature poetry that are the most important reference points up to now. The poems about nature written in the early 21st century refer to these models as well as to their destruction and deconstruction by the modernists and avantgardes of the 20th century. The most convincing poets devoting their attention to nature today play with these traditions with artistic perfection and in an ironic manner at the same time. Often, annotations, essays, and talks on nature are accompanying the lyrical texts. In the present, female writers are the authors of some of the best poems about nature. In several poems, the relationship between love and nature appears under new perspectives. Other important subjects are the landscapes of far-away countries.

Literature and thus also historical poetry want “not only to convey factual truth and to exhort subjective truthfulness, but also to give orientation for the – in whatever respect – correct or appropriate world behavior” (Lamping 2013: 65f.). The question of this paper is to what extent and how the 9/11-poems of Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein offer a specific counter-historiography beyond the dichotomies of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, in order to achieve a different level of knowledge. Due to the exhibited self-relatedness Grünbein presents not only in his essayistic pretext but also in his poem „September-Elegien“ mainly a subjective truthfulness rather than any certain orientation-knowledge. Kling’s historiographical-wrapped and complex instrumented poem „Manhattan Mundraum Zwei“ offers over-temporal, metaphysical-existential (counter-)truths and gives orientation beyond media-presented “facts” about 9/11.

This article analyses the depiction of school as a place of knowledge in contemporary poetry in English. In dealing with the poetry of Jean Breeze (Jamaica/GB), Gillian Clarke (Wales/GB), Carol Ann Duffy (England/GB), Thabo Jijana (South Africa), Meena Kandasamy (Tamil Nadu/India), Claudia Rankine (USA) and Edwin Thumboo (Singapore), it does not only enable the reader to draw pedagogical conclusions from poetic evidence. The article differentiates further between a poem’s potential of knowledge and its process of knowledge developed during its reception; taking, additionally, into account how its reception might interfere with the poem’s potential of knowledge and even with its author’s intention. Eventually, each poem highlights an important anglophone region ranging from the United States, the Caribbean, India and South Africa to the British Isles and Singapore. Hence, each poem is also interpreted in its cultural and historical context. Last but not least, the article tries to undertake a comparative analysis of the role of contemporary German-language poetry within educational contexts in Germany.

Walter Benjamin developed his concept of the “aura” on the basis of the poetry of Baudelaire and applied this term to objects of art, nature, and man. Georg Picht transformed Benjamin’s aura-concept into a method of pre-rational knowledge forms, whose mediums includes foremost music, but also poetry and art. In modern nature poetry the varieties of aura cognition can be determined and described with the help of Benjamin’s and Picht’s concepts: Gennadij Ajgi creates poetic equivalents for the experience of nature-aura; Keijiro Suga makes a diagnosis of aura of areas of natural sites or landscapes and their historical transformation through war and nuclear catastrophe (Fukushima); Christian Lehnert translates auratic communication with nature in poetic conversations.

On account of its constitution as a temporally organized sequence of verbal utterances, typically presented from a speaker’s subjective perspective, lyric poetry is particularly suited to simulate mental processes and thereby mediate forms of cognition and insight. Indeed, the presentation of cognitive phenomena can be considered one of the prime functions of lyric poems throughout the history of poetry. For the analysis of such processes in poems a transgeneric narratological approach is here proposed, which is ultimately based on the anthropological fact that human existence is inescapably subject to temporality and change and that individuals are therefore permanently concerned with understanding, structuring, planning or preventing change. For this purpose, they employ the basic operation of narration in their communication both with others and themselves as well as in the production and reception of the various artistic genres, not only in fiction, drama and film, but also in lyric poetry. Poems employ narrative elements in a variety of modes which are specific to poetry, such as psycho-narration, mini-narratives, condensed, implicit or metaphorical narratives. A central device for structuring and interpreting a narrative sequence is the event, a transformation or decisive turn in the chain of changes, which then constitutes the moment of cognition or insight in the poem. The presentation of such a mental transformation from the speaker’s limited subjective perspective allows for a critical assessment of status and motivation of the process of cognition on the part of the reader. This transgeneric narratological approach to the cognitive dimension of lyric poetry will first be demonstrated with the analysis of an older prototypical example, W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, and then applied to three recent, complex British-Irish poems, Eavan Boland’s “The Making of an Irish Goddess”, Kathleen Jamie’s “The Way We Live” and Paul Muldoon’s “Why Brownlee Left”, exemplifying the range of variation in which lyric poetry can perform and mediate mental processes of cognition.

The problem of this volume is not so much ‚Lyrik‘ but rather ‚Erkenntnis‘ (knowledge, cognition). This paper, therefore, discusses a revision of the notion of ‚erkennen‘ (knowing, realizing, understanding), explaining it as a way of transforming our way of thinking things at the same time as understanding ourselves and other cognizant beings. In this way, the notion of knowledge / understanding is to be freed from the narrow restrictions of science, by which most of us have acquired the habit of limiting understanding to specific scientific methods. Beyond the bounds of established scientific standards, the practice of philosophical thinking reveals analogies to the practice of lyrical thinking. Both try to explore new ways of thinking beyond the limits of established methodological guidelines. Which characteristics do they share, which differences remain? But most of all, how can these nonscientific ways of searching for knowledge be protected from confusion and disorientation? How may their ways of thinking be legitimized? Where do they lead? A major thesis of the paper argues that both ways of searching for knowledge, poetry and philosophy, question the generally accepted distinction of analytical and synthetic judgements. This distinction is a constitutive element of any scientific discourse manifesting itself in the importance of the introductory definitions of its specific basic terms. They start from the common experience that seemingly evident words and notions, by being used in unaccustomed ways, may change their meanings, i.e. their relations to other words and notions. Both in their own traditions, experimental practices of thinking poetry as well as philosophy, may succeed in opening up new ways of perceiving of things as well as realizing the thinkers’ own position in the world while attempting to convince others to join them in doing so.

The relationship between poetry and cognition appears, at first glance, as hardly compelling as that of art and science, of feeling and thinking, or even of intuition and analysis. For this reason, its analysis is fundamentally concerned with questions from philosophical and literary criticism perspectives: Which forms of “cognition” are possible in poetry? In what way and in what forms can poetry also be a medium of generation and/or mediation of cognition, experience or even knowledge and truth? And which processes, matters, or “information” are thereby privileged? Are there subgenres of poetry, for example historical poetry, reflective poetry or didactic poetry, that are especially relevant as regards cognitive functions? And can cognition also be mediated through aura, Stimmung or experience?

Lyrik gilt vielfach als hermetisch, gefühlszentriert oder ästhetisch überdeterminiert. Daher ist das Verhältnis von Lyrik und Erkenntnis auf den ersten Blick so wenig zwingend wie das von Kunst und Wissenschaft, von Fühlen und Denken oder auch von Intuition und Analyse. Die Beiträge des Bandes widmen sich aus philosophischer und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive Praktiken und Formen, die sich in der Lyrik, insbesondere in der Gegenwartslyrik, möglicher Erkenntnisfunktionen bedienen. Dabei geht es um grundsätzliche Fragen zum Verhältnis von Lyrik und Erkenntnis: Welche Formen von ‚Erkenntnis‘ sind in der Lyrik überhaupt möglich? Inwiefern und mit welchen Formen kann Lyrik auch ein Mittel der Generierung und/oder Vermittlung von Erkenntnis, Erfahrung oder gar Wissen und Wahrheit sein und welche Verfahren, Inhalte oder ‚Informationen‘ werden dabei bevorzugt? Gibt es Subgenres der Lyrik, beispielsweise Geschichtslyrik, Gedankenlyrik oder Lehrdichtung, die im Hinblick auf Erkenntnisfunktionen besonders relevant sind? Und kann Erkenntnis auch durch Aura, Stimmung oder Erlebnis vermittelt werden?