The Bow and the Lyre (Texas Pan American Series) by Paz Octavio

Author:Paz, Octavio [Paz, Octavio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780292753457
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2013-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Poetry and History

9. The Consecration of the Instant

On preceding pages i tried to distinguish the poetic act from other related experiences. Now it becomes necessary to show how that irreducible act is inserted into the world. Although poetry is not religion, or magic, or thought, in order to be realized as a poem it always leans on something alien to it. Alien, but without which it could not become incarnate. The poem is poetry and something else as well. And this as well is not something false or added on, but a constituent of its being. A pure poem would be that in which the words abandoned their particular meanings and their references to this or that, to signify only the act of poetizing—an exigency that would cause their disappearance, because words are nothing but the meanings of this and that, that is, of relative and historical objects. A pure poem could not be made of words and would be, literally, unsayable. At the same time, a poem that did not struggle against the nature of words, obliging them to go beyond themselves and their relative meanings, a poem that did not try to make words say the unsayable, would remain a simple verbal manipulation. What characterizes the poem is its necessary dependence on the word as much as its struggle to transcend it. This circumstance permits an investigation of its nature as something unique and irreducible and, simultaneously, permits us to regard it as a social expression that is inseparable from other historical manifestations. The poem, a being of words, goes beyond words and history does not deplete its meaning; but the poem would have no meaning—or even an existence—without history, without the community that nourishes it and is nourished by it.

The poet’s words, precisely because they are words, are his and others’. On the one hand, they are historical: they belong to a people and to a moment of the speech of that people: they are datable. On the other hand, they are prior to any date: they are an absolute beginning. Without the combination of circumstances we call Greece, neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey would exist; but without those poems, the historical reality that was Greece would not have existed either. The poem is a fabric of perfectly datable words and an act that precedes every date: the original act with which all social or individual history begins; the expression of a society and, simultaneously, the foundation of that society, the condition of its existence. Without a common word there is no poem; without a poetic word, there is no society, state, church, or community whatever. The poetic word is historical in two complementary, inseparable, and contradictory senses: it constitutes a social product and it is a previous condition for the existence of every society.

The language that nourishes the poem is, after all, nothing but history, name of this or that, reference and meaning that alludes to a closed historical world and whose sense is depleted with that of its central personage: a man or a group of men.

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