The Poetics of Withdrawal When the "I" Withdraws from the Poem - A Cross-Cultural Poetic Category: Proposal and Construction

This study proposes a new poetic category—the Poetics of Withdrawal—defined by a single proposition: the poet stands aside, and all things speak themselves. The argument unfolds across eight chapters. It establishes the philosophical foundations of withdrawal in Aristotle's concept ofphysis, Heidegger's phenomenology of the thing, and Merleau-Ponty's account of the body as a channel of perception. It then traces an independent but structurally parallel tradition in Daoist aesthetics, from Laozi's hollow vessel through Zhuangzi's lost self to Wang Wei's empty mountain. A chapter on the modernist prehistory of withdrawal—Mallarmé, Rilke, Pound, Williams, Stevens, the Objectivists—shows that what Celan and Grünbein later radicalized was already latent in the lyric tradition. The final chapters bring the Poetics of Withdrawal into dialogue with Käte Hamburger's logic of the lyric, sound studies, and new materialism. The Poetics of Withdrawal is offered here as a universal poetic category with roots in both Western and Chinese thought. This study puts forward the Poetics of Withdrawal as a brand-new cross-cultural poetic category. No complete and systematic research on this subject can be found in existing academic literature.