[âŠ] One shouldn't demand of poetry any special quiddity, concreteness, materiality. It's that very same revolutionary hunger. The doubt of Thomas. Why should one have to touch it with the fingers? But the main point is, why should the word be identified with the thing, with the grass, with the object that it signifies?
Is the thing master of the word? The word is a Psyche. The living word does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, this or that objective significance, materiality, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten.
What's been said of materiality sounds somewhat different applied to imagery: 'Prends l'eloquence et tord-lui son cou!'
Write imageless poems if you can, if you know how. A blind man will recognize a beloved face by just barely having touched it with his seeing fingers; and tears of joy, the authentic joy of recognition, will spurt from his eyes after a long separation. The poem is alive through an inner image, that resounding mold of form, which anticipates the written poem. Not a single word has appeared, but the poem already resounds. What resounds is the inner image; what touches it is the poet's aural sense.
'And the flash of recognition alone is sweet to us!'
These days, something like glossolalia manifests itself. In sacred frenzy, poets speak in the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible. Just as a room where a man is dying is opened to all, so that door of the old world is flung wide before the crowd. Suddenly everything has become common property. Come in and help yourself. Everything's available: all the labyrinths, all the hiding places, all the forbidden paths. The word has become, not a seven-stop, but a thousand-stop reed, instantly animated by the breathing of all the ages. In glossolalia the most striking thing is that the speaker does not know the language in which he speaks. He speaks in a totally obscure tongue. And to everyone, and to him, too, it seems he's talking. Greek or Babylonian. It is something quite the reverse of erudition. Contemporary poetry, for all its complexity and its inner violence, is naive: 'Ecoutez la chanson griseâŠ'
A synthetic poet of modern life would seem to me to be not a Verhaeren, but a kind of Verlaine of culture. For him the whole complexity of the old world would be like that same old Pushkinian reed. In him, ideas, scientific systems, political theories would sing, just as nightingales and roses used to sing in his predecessors. They say the cause of revolution is hunger in the interplanetary spaces. One has to sow wheat in the ether.
Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution.
--from 'The Word and Culture,' Osip Mandelstam, trans. Sidney Monas
[Mandelstam probably wrote this between 1910 and 1923, as per his own note to this set]
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