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has been singing off-key now for a century or more; at last we can no longer tune in. The screech of the bomb still makes sense to us, but the ravings of the poet seem like gibberish. And it is gibberish if, out of two billion people who make up the world, only a few thousand pretend to understand what the individual poet is saying. The cult of art reaches its end when it exists only for a precious handful of men and women. Then it is no longer art but the cipher language of a secret society for the propagation of meaningless individuality. Art is something which stirs men’s passions, which gives vision, lucidity, courage and faith. Has any artist in words of recent years stirred the world as did Hitler? Has any poem shocked the world as did the atomic bomb recently? Not since the coming of Christ have we seen such vistas unfolding, multiplying daily. What weapons has the poet compared to these?
Or what dreams?
Where now is his vaunted imagination? Reality is here before our very eyes, stark naked, but where is the song to announce it? Is there a poet of even the fifth magnitude visible? I see none. I do not call poets those who make verses, rhymed or unrhymed. I call that man poet who is capable of profoundly altering the world. If there be such a poet living in our midst, let him declare himself. Let him raise his voice! But it will have to be a voice which can drown the roar of the bomb. He will have to use a language which melts men’s hearts, which makes the blood bubble.
    If the mission of poetry is to awaken, we ought to have been awakened long ago. Some have been awakened, there is no denying that. But now
all
men have to be awakened—and immediately—or we perish. But man will never perish, depend on that. It is a culture, a civilization, a way of life which will perish. When these dead awaken, as they will, poetry will be the very stuff of life. We can afford to lose the poet if we are to preserve poetry itself. It does not require paper and ink to create poetry or to disseminate it. Primitive peoples on the whole are poets of action, poets of life. They are still making poetry, though it moves us not. Were we alive to the poetic, we would not be immune to their way of life: we would have incorporated their poetry in ours, we would have infused our lives with the beauty which permeates theirs. The poetry of the civilized man has always been exclusive, esoteric. It has brought about its own demise.
    “We must be absolutely modern,” said Rimbaud, meaning that chimeras are out of date, and superstitions and fetiches and creeds and dogmas and all the cherished drivel and inanity of which our vaunted civilization is composed. We must bring light, not artificial illumination. “Money is depreciating everywhere,” he wrote in one of his letters. That was back in the ’80’s. Today in Europe it has practically no value whatever. What men want is food, shelter, clothing—basic things—not money. The rotten edifice has crumbled before our very eyes, but we are reluctant to believe our eyes. We still hope to be able to do business as usual. We neither realize the damage that has been done nor the possibilities of rebirth. We are using the language of the Old Stone Age. If men cannot grasp the enormity of the present how will they ever be able to think in terms of the future? We have been thinking in terms of the past for several thousand years. Now, at one stroke, that whole mysterious past has been obliterated. There is only the future staring us in the face. It yawns like a gulf. It is terrifying, everyone concedes, even to begin to think what the future holds in store for us. Far more terrifying than the past ever was. In the past the monsters were of human proportions; one could cope with them, if one were heroic enough. Now the monster is invisible; there are billions of them in a grain of dust. I am still using the language of the Old Stone Age, you will notice. I speak as though the atom itself were the