If one looks for the original significance of
poetry, today concealed by the thousand flashy rags of society, one
ascertains that poetry is the true inspiration of humanity, the source
of all knowledge and knowledge itself in its most immaculate aspect.
The entire spiritual life of humanity since it began to be aware of
itself is condensed in poetry; in it quivers humanity's highest creations
and, land ever fertile, it keeps perpetually in reserve the colourless
crystals and harvests of tomorrow. Tutelary god with a thousand faces,
it is here called love, there freedom, elsewhere science. It remains
omnipotent, bubbling up in the Eskimo's mythic tale; bursting forth
in the love letter; machine-gunning the firing squad that shoots the
worker exhaling his last breath of revolution and thus of freedom;
gleaming in the scientist's discovery; faltering, bloodless, as even
the stupidest productions draw on it; while its memory, a eulogy that
wishes to be funereal, still penetrates the mummified words of the
priest, poetry's assassin, listened to by the faithful as they blindly
and dumbly look for it in the tomb of dogma where poetry is no more
than delusive dust.
Poetry's innumerable detractors, true and false
priests, more hypocritical than the priesthood of any church, false
witnesses of every epoch, accuse it of being a means of escape, a
flight from reality, as if it were not reality itself, reality's essence
and exaltation. But incapable of conceiving of reality as a whole
and in its complex relations, they wish to see it only under its most
immediate, most sordid aspect. They see only adultery without ever
experiencing love, the bomber plane without recalling Icarus, the
adventure novel without understanding the permanent, elementary, and
profound poetic inspiration that it has the ambition of satisfying.
They scorn the dream in favour of their reality as if the dream were
not one of the most deeply moving aspects of reality; they exalt action
at the expense of meditation as if the former without the latter were
not a sport as meaningless as any other. Formerly, they opposed the
mind to matter, their god to man; now they defend matter against the
mind. In point of fact, they have brought intuition to the aid of
reason without remembering from whence this reason sprang.
The enemies of poetry have always been obsessed
with subjecting it to their immediate ends, with crushing it under
their god or, as now, with constraining it under orders of the new
brown or "red" divinity - the reddish-brown of dried blood
- even bloodier than the old one. For them, life and culture are summed
up in the useful and the useless, it being understood that the useful
takes the form of a pickaxe wielded for their benefit. For them, poetry
is only a luxury for the rich - the aristocrat and the banker - and
if it wants to become "useful" to the masses, it should
become resigned to the lot of the "applied," "decorative,"
and "domestic" arts.
Instinctively they sense, however, that poetry
is the fulcrum Archimedes required, and they fear that the world,
once raised up, might fall back on their heads. Hence the ambition
to debase poetry, to deny it all efficacity, all value as an exaltation,
to give it the hypocritical, consolatory role of a sister of charity.
But the poet does not have to perpetuate for others
an illusory hope, whether human or celestial, nor disarm minds while
filling them with boundless confidence in a father or a leader against
whom any criticism becomes a sacrilege. Quite the contrary, it is
up to the poet to give voice to words always sacrilegious, to permanent
blasphemies. The poet should first become aware of his nature and
place in the world. An inventor for whom a discovery is only the means
of reaching new discoveries, he must relentlessly combat the paralyzing
gods eager to keep humanity in servitude with respect to social powers
and the divinity, which complement one another. Thus he will be a
revolutionary but not one of those who oppose today's tyrant, whom
they see as baneful because he has betrayed their interests, only
to praise tomorrow's oppressor, whose servants they already are. No,
the poet struggles against all oppression: first of all, that of man
by man and the oppression of thought by religious, philosophical,
or social dogmas. He fights so that humanity can attain an ever more
perfect knowledge of itself and the universe. It does not follow that
he wants to put poetry at the service of political, even revolutionary
action. But his being a poet has made him a revolutionary who must
fight on all terrains: on the terrain of poetry by appropriate means
and on the terrain of social action, without ever confusing the two
fields of action under penalty of re-establishing the confusion that
is to be dissipated and consequently ceasing to be a poet, that is
to say, a revolutionary.
