This issue proposes new approaches to thinking poetry, philosophy and politics together, in a historically informed but present-oriented way that is sensitive to their disjunctive and mutually critical energies. Contributions explore the multiple relations of poetry, philosophy and politics emergent in the writings of key modern and contemporary French-language poets from Baudelaire to Cédric Demangeot, via (inter alia) Césaire, Glissant, Bonnefoy, du Bouchet and Philippe Beck - but with reference equally to contemporary thinkers and theorists attentive to the work of poetry in the world of its emergence. This issue attests to the central theoretical importance of the poietic faculty for the analysis of present-day human realities.