Kundera & the Poetic Imagination
Milan Kundera’s novel, Life is Elsewhere, contains both a celebration and a critique of poetry (aren’t the best critiques rooted in love?). The main characteristic of poetry, which is the target of his critique, is the force of poetic imagination toward finality. The poet, like a god, doesn’t simply consider a possibility; she creates and proclaims! “Look at what I have created!” What is created presents itself as always having been there, as a fate,…