“The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.”
—Octavio Paz
Poetry is knowledge
Poetry is Knowledge, salvation, power abandonment.
An operation capable of changing the world,
poetic activity is revolutionary by nature;
a spiritual exercise, it is a means
of interior liberation.
Poetry reveals this world;
it creates another.
Bread of the chosen; accursed food.
It isolates; it unites.
Invitation to the journey; return to the homeland.
Inspiration, respiration, muscular exercise.
Prayer to the void, dialogue with absence:
tedium, anguish, and despair nourish it.
Prayer, litany, epiphany, presence.
Exorcism, conjuration, magic.
Sublimation, compensation,
condensation of the unconscious.
Historic expression of races, nations, classes.
It denies history: at its core all objective conflicts
are resolved and man at last acquires consciousness
of being something more than a transient.
Experience, feeling, emotion, intuition,
undirected thought. Result of chance;
fruit of calculation.
Art of speaking in a superior way; primitive language.
Obedience to rules; creation of others.
Imitation of the ancients, copy of the real,
copy of a copy of the Idea.
Madness, ecstasy, logos.
by Octavio Paz
from The Bow and the Lyre
(translation: Ruth L.C. Simms,
University of Texas Press, 1987)
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