PARTISAN REVIEW
the poet has withdrawn from language-instrument in a single move–
ment. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which con–
siders words as things and not as signs. For the ambiguity of the sign
implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and
pursue the thing signified, or turn his gaze toward its
reality
and
consider it as an object. The man who talks is beyond words and
near the object, whereas the poet is on this side of them. For the
former, they are domesticated; for the latter they are in the wild
state. For the former, they are useful conventions, tools which are
used little by little and which one throws away when they are no
longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout
naturally upon the earth like grass and trees.
But if he dwells upon words, as does the painter with colors
and the musician with sounds, that does not mean that they have
lost
all
signification in his eyes. Indeed, it is signification alone which
can give words their verbal unity. Without it they are frittered away
into sounds and strokes of the pen. Only, it too becomes natural. It
is no longer the goal which is always out of reach and which human
transcendence is always aiming at, but a property of each term,
analogous to the expression of a face, to the little sad or gay meaning
of sounds and colors. Having flowed into the word, having been
absorbed by its sonority or visual aspect, having been thickened and
defaced, it too is a thing, increate and eternal.
For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The
speaker is
in a situation
in language; he is invested with words. They
are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his
eyeglasses. He maneuvers them from within; he feels them as
if
they
were his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly
aware of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is
outside of language. He sees words inside out as ·if he did not share
the human condition, and as if he were first meeting the word as a
barrier as he comes toward men. Instead of first knowing things by
their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since,
turning toward that other species of thing which for him is the word,
touching them, testing them, palping them, he discovers
in
them a
slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with the earth,
the sky, the water, and all created things.
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