Aristotle's concept of generativity (in the context of reproduction and the transmission of form) has been extended by feminist philosophers like Sara Ruddick and Julia Kristeva to think about the maternal as a philosophical category, and poets like Anne Carson and Sharon Olds explore generativity as both biological and cultural production; In Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," the philosophical concept of generativity — the endless production of new life from prior life — is figured both in the natural world (the sea, the birds) and in the cultural world (the poem itself as a generative act arising from the encounter with death and loss); A poet meditating on mentorship or the transmission of cultural tradition might use generativity philosophically (in Erikson's sense — the adult's concern with establishing and guiding the next generation) to think about what one owes to the future; Keats's meditation on negative capability and the empathic imagination can be read as a form of generativity — the poet's capacity to generate, through imaginative identification, the inner lives of others; The question of whether art is a form of generativity — the creation of something that will outlast the maker and generate new understanding in successive readers — is a philosophical claim about the artwork's relationship to time and mortality; Postcolonial poets writing in indigenous languages often frame their work as generativity — the poem as an act of cultural reproduction that sustains the language and its associated form of life against the forces of linguistic extinction