by

stirring numbed and dormant spirits

William Carlos Williams (New York City, 1955):

My heart rouses

            thinking to bring you news

                         of something

that concerns you

            and concerns many men.  Look at

                         what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in

            despised poems.

                         It is difficult

to get the news from poems

            yet men die miserably every day

                         for lack

of what is found there.

            Hear me out

                         for I too am concerned

and every man

            who wants to die at peace in his bed

                         besides.

Nadezhda Mandelstam (Moscow, 1973):

The great mass of people thus prefer to glide over the the surface of reality, always shirking the effort of trying to understand it.

One of the most brilliant men in the history of mankind once said that as soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words. A word is too easily transformed from a meaningful sign into a mere signal, and a group of words into an empty formula, bereft even of the sense such things have in magic. We begin to exchange set phrases, not noticing that all living meaning has gone from them. Poor, trembling creatures—we don’t know what meaning is; it has vanished from a world in which there is no room any more for the Logos. It will return only if and when people come to their senses and recall that man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul.

But with all this, whatever his quality, the reader is the final arbiter, and it is for him that I kept M.’s poetry and it is to him that I have handed it over. And now, in this long period we are presently living through, a curious process is taking place: people casually leaf through a volume of poetry and, scarcely aware of what is happening, gradually soak it in, until it stirs their numbed and dormant spirits, waking them up and itself coming to life again as it revivifies those it touches. It is a process of diffusion, of interpenetration, by which at least some people are brought back to their senses and given the strength to shake off their accursed inertia. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it. If I am right about this, if the verse I have preserved is of some use to people, then my life has not been wasted and I have done what I had to do both for the man who was my other self and for all those people whose humane, that is, human instincts are roused by poetry. If this is so, it means that I probably had a preordained task to fulfill and that I have correctly understood it.

(Also this and this.)