When Paul Claudel began to compose l’Art Poétique, he was taking his first look at the “grand livre de l’Orient” as a young consul in China. Fed up with the “l’ancienne [logique qui] avait le syllogism pour organe” (the old logic with the syllogism as its motor), Claudel constructed “une nouvelle logique” that could explain the correspondences he found in the “East”:

This new logic accounts for the co-naissance of self and other, the way in which two things fill one another's gaps and bring one another into being, just as the greenery of the maple rises to accord with the pine at Chuzenji. It might be more just to say that the two things bring a new aspect of one another into existence. The pine and the maple complement one another and create a third image that arises from their fusion. When we compare in order to carry out world literature in theory, and when the writers we study compare to carry out world literature in practice, we carry out a similar process. We create a new simplified set of the two things we are comparing. This set includes properties we believe are held by each thing, be it the “East,” “China,” “France,” or “Britain.” But, like Claudel's maple and pine, this image needs the image of the comparand, the thing to which it is compared, in order to be complete: