Materialist dialectic

At the end of Peter Weiss s play Holderlin, the eponymous poet is visited by the young Karl Marx. It is an entirely apocryphal encounter, but one which is revealing in terms of the relationship between writers and politics in the 1960s and 1970S. Marx describes how the encounter with Holderlin s poetry has led to his realisation of the need for a materialist, dialectical political philosophy. He concludes that in furthering the aim of societal change the artist s individual vision is of equal status with political analysis. 

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