Sartre’s Conception of Poetry: Between Failure, Negativity and Commitment

Abstract

This work develops Sartre’s approaches to the issue of Poetry, the poetic projects and its possibility of commitment on Situations II, his existential biographies Baudelaire and Saint Genet, and his study on black poetry in Orphée noir. Despite the critics that had been made to him arguing that he didn’t understand the essence of the poetic phenomenon, an attentive reading may show how Sartre’s idea of poetry has turned with time, to the point of considering it a tool as strong as prose to arouse commitment and freedom by a negative operation in which critically reflects mankind’s essence as an unsolvable conflict and failure.