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. Details »