"Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry"
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Sartre is smuggling a provocation into what sounds like a lofty tribute: poetry isn’t a decorative art, it’s an historical function. The line turns literature into a relay race where “history” itself appoints the next runner, and the baton is not power but expression. That framing carries the existentialist sting. If human beings are thrown into conditions they didn’t choose, then meaning isn’t discovered; it’s made under pressure. Poetry becomes the emergency language for moments when ordinary discourse can’t metabolize the new reality.
The subtext is also political, and a bit dangerous. “A nation, a race, a class” signals Sartre’s mid-century attraction to collective subjects and revolutionary agency, the era when decolonization and class struggle were treated as the main engines of history. He’s implying that certain groups are historically “chosen” to articulate the age’s contradictions, not by divine right but by circumstance: war, occupation, poverty, liberation movements. In occupied France, where Sartre wrote under the shadow of censorship and collaboration, that idea wasn’t abstract. Art had to either serve propaganda, retreat into formalism, or find a third path: saying what could not be said directly.
Why it works is the double move of “expressed or transcended.” Expression is documentation; transcendence is transformation. Sartre refuses to let poetry be merely witness. He wants it to be a lever: the act that converts historical brute fact into human freedom, even while admitting that history picks the battlefield first.
The subtext is also political, and a bit dangerous. “A nation, a race, a class” signals Sartre’s mid-century attraction to collective subjects and revolutionary agency, the era when decolonization and class struggle were treated as the main engines of history. He’s implying that certain groups are historically “chosen” to articulate the age’s contradictions, not by divine right but by circumstance: war, occupation, poverty, liberation movements. In occupied France, where Sartre wrote under the shadow of censorship and collaboration, that idea wasn’t abstract. Art had to either serve propaganda, retreat into formalism, or find a third path: saying what could not be said directly.
Why it works is the double move of “expressed or transcended.” Expression is documentation; transcendence is transformation. Sartre refuses to let poetry be merely witness. He wants it to be a lever: the act that converts historical brute fact into human freedom, even while admitting that history picks the battlefield first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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