Braschi G. K. Chesterton Robert Creeley Samuel Taylor Coleridge T. S. Eliot Homer Søren Kierkegaard Lucretius John Milton Marianne Moore Pablo Neruda Friedrich Nietzsche Mary Oliver Fernando Pessoa Rainer Maria Rilke Percy Bysshe Shelley St. John of the Cross Leslie Marmon Silko Hildegard von Bingen William Carlos Williams C. K. Williams James Wright Philosophical fiction Some philosophers have undertaken to write philosophy in the form of fiction, including novels and short stories (see separate article on philosophical fiction). This is apparent early on in the literature of philosophy, where philosophers such as Plato wrote dialogues in which fictional or fictionalized characters discuss philosophical subjects; Socrates frequently appears as a protagonist in Plato's dialogues, and the dialogues are one of the prime sources of knowledge about Socrates' teaching, though at this remove it is sometimes hard to distinguish Socrates' actual positions from Plato's own. Numerous early Christian writers, including Augustine, Boethius, and Peter Abelard produced dialogues; several early modern philosophers, such as George Berkeley and David Hume, wrote occasionally in this genre. Other philosophers have resorted to narrative to get their teachings across. The classical 12th century Islamic philosopher, Abubacer (Ibn Tufail), wrote a fictional Arabic narrative Philosophus Autodidactus as a response to al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and then the 13th century Islamic theologian-philosopher Ibn al-Nafis also wrote a fictional narrative Theologus Autodidactus as a response to Abubacer's Philosophus Autodidactus. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche often articulated his ideas in literary modes, most notably in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a re-imagined account of the teachings of Zoroaster. Marquis de Sade and Ayn Rand wrote novels in which characters served as mouthpieces for philosophical positions, and act in accordance with them in the plot. George Santayana was also a philosopher who wrote novels and poetry; the relationship between Santayana's characters and his beliefs is more complex. The existentialists include among their numbers important French authors who used fiction to convey their philosophical views; these include Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea and play No Exit, and Albert Camus's The Stranger. Maurice Blanchot's entire fictional production, whose titles include The Step Not Beyond, The madness of the Day, and The Writing of Disaster, among others, constitutes an indispensable corpus for the treatment of the relationship between philosophy and literature. So does Jacques Derrida's The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. A number of philosophers have had important influence on literature. Arthur Schopenhauer,