The Purpose Of Poetry Is To Restore

It Is Not Proper To Project Our Feelings Onto Things Or To Attribute Our Own Sensations And Passions To Them. Can It Also Be Improper To See In Them A Guide, A Way Of Life? To Learn The Art Of Remaining Motionless Amid The Agitation Of The Whirlwind, To Learn To Remain Still And To Be As Transparent As This Fixed Light Amid The Frantic Branches This May Be A Program For Life.

The Religion Of Art, Like The Religion Of Politics, Was Born From The Ruins Of Christianity. Art Inherited From The Old Religion The Power Of Consecrating Things And Endowing Them With A Sort Of Eternity; Museums Are Our Temples, And The Objects Displayed In Them Are Beyond History. Politics--or More Precisely, Revolution--co-opted The Other Function Of Religion: Changing Human Beings And Society. Art Was An Asceticism, A Spiritual Heroism; Revolution Was The Construction Of A Universal Church.

There Can Be No Society Without Poetry, But Society Can Never Be Realized As Poetry, It Is Never Poetic. Sometimes The Two Terms Seek To Break Apart. They Cannot.

To Read A Poem Is To Hear It With Our Eyes; To Hear It Is To See It With Our Ears.

If We Are A Metaphor Of The Universe, The Human Couple Is The Metaphor Par Excellence, The Point Of Intersection Of All Forces And The Seed Of All Forms. The Couple Is Time Recaptured, The Return To The Time Before Time.