WHAT IS WRIT I NG?
Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose,
even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking
of contemporary poetry. History presents other forms of poetry. It is not my
concern to show their connection with ours. Thus, if one absolutely wishes to
speak of the engagement of the poet, let us say that he is the man who engages
himself to lose. This is the deeper meaning of that tough-luck, of that malediction
with which he always claims kinship and which he always attributes to an inter–
vention from without, where as it is his deepest choice, the source, and not the
consequence, of his poetry. He is certain of the total defeat of the human enter–
prise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual
defeat, to human defeat in general. Thus, he contests, as we shall see, which is
what the prose-writer does too. But the contesting of prose is carried on in the
name of a greater success; and that of poetry, in the name of the hidden defeat
which every victory conceals.
5.
It
goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is,
of success, is present; and, vice-versa, the driest prose always contains a bit of
poetry, that is, a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is
quite
capable of ex–
pressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each phrase is
a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more attention the word
attracts; as Valery has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom.
Thus, each word is used simultaneously for its clear and social meaning and for
certain obscure resonances-let me say, almost for its physiognomy. The reader,
too, is sensitive to this. At once we arll no longer on the level of concerted com–
munication, but on that of grace and chance; the silences of prose are poetic
because they mark its limits, and it is for the purpose of greater clarity that I
have been considering the extreme cases of pure prose and pure poetry. How–
ever, it need not be concluded that we can pass from poetry to prose by a con–
tinuous series of intermediate forms.
If
the prose writer is too eager to fondle his
words, the
eidos
of "prose" is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense.
If
the poet relates, explains, or teaches, the poetry becomes
prosaic;
he has lost
the game. It is a matter of complex structures, impure, but well-defined.
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