This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet’s words to their logical or grammatical connotations.
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings
life is other, always there,further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon,life which unlives us and makes us strangers,that invents our face and wears it away
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
CodaPerhaps to love is to learnto walk through this world.To learn to be silentlike the oak and the linden of the fable.To learn to see.Your glance scattered seeds.It planted a tree. I talkbecause you shake its leaves.
There was only one huge world with no back to itA world like a sunOne day it broke into tiny piecesThey were the words of the language we now speakPieces that will never come togetherBroken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered
Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.
I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.(“The Blue Bouquet”)
I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths but he has not been able to destroy them.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down we don’t move today is today always is today.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.
The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall – that of our consciousness – between the world and ourselves.
No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.