"Go on flutter ye mystic ballad - ah haunting & Tokay jittery ye be like the mad pulse - the mad pulse of a child - the children of ring around the rosy & wandering poets over India - the jugglers who call you by the wrong name & title you wounded kitten - it is that easy for they know no fairy tales..."
Excerpt Tarantula, Bob Dylan
When it comes to speaking to others, the poet hesitates, he doesn't read well his poem. Or he reads it as if it were another's. He reads it without comprehending it. Thus Claudel when he puts on his glasses and acts just like a notary when he reads his great works... Some other makes of his poems, by his hesitations, something shredding. Must we distrust the poets who read their works too well? No; I know of some who can restore about their work the Atmosphere from which it was born... But owing to certain realist tendencies I feel in me, or to a certain incapacity, I would hesitate to define poetry as a "creation of the world". of course the idea of the world is the effect of an illusion, at once retrospective and totalizing. Poetry is rather the creation of a language or a music, of a language which is a music.
Excerpt from translation 'La Poesie comme Exercise Spirituel, from Poesie, Pensee, and Perception, by Jean Wahl
"Often it is not the meaning of a verse that grabs and holds us, but something else, the interior accompaniment and care it brings up within us."
