POETIC REASON AND EXISTENCE:

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY IN THE THOUGHT OF MARÍA ZAMBRANO

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between philosophy and poetry in the work of the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano (1904–1991), centred on the concept of poetic reason. Drawing on an analysis of Philosophy and Poetry (1939), a work written during the author's years in exile, the study develops through three interconnected lines of inquiry. First, it situates Zambrano's biographical trajectory as a constitutive condition of her thought, arguing that exile is not a peripheral given but an epistemic figure that sustains her way of philosophising at the margins of established categories. Second, it reconstructs the historical dichotomy between philosophy and poetry from its origins in Plato's Republic, problematising the reading that reduces the expulsion of the poets to a simple rejection of poetic language and pointing out the ambiguity that Plato himself leaves open. Third, it examines Zambrano's proposal of poetic reason as a mode of knowledge that operates from within experience, without abandoning it for abstract concepts, articulating it with the notion of mystery present in Man and the Divine and with her critique of the rationalist model that excludes whatever resists formalisation. The article concludes that poetic reason does not represent a dissolution of philosophical rigour, but rather its expansion towards forms of knowledge that the dominant tradition had marginalised.