🌬️ Some favorite quotes from Valéry’s, Poetry and Abstract Thought:
A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.
The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.
“Thought is, in short, the activity which causes what does not exist to come alive in us, lending to it, whether we will or no, our present powers, making us take the part for the whole, the image for reality, and giving us the illusion of seeing, acting, suffering, and possessing independently of our dear old body… Anticipation and its gropings, desire, planning, the projection of our hopes, of our fears, are the main interior activity of our being.”