What is poetry? Part 5

The poet is like a seismograph that vibrates from every quake, even if it is thousands of miles away.  It's not that he thinks incessantly of all things in the world.  But they think of him.  They are in him,  and thus do they rule over him.  Even his dull hours, his depressions, his confusions are impersonal states; they are like the spasms of the seismograph, and a deep enough gaze could read more mysterious things in them than in his poems. -- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "The Poet and the Present Time," 1907.

"From this passage Warburg's art history seems to have retained two points: the 'despecification' of discourse ('indeed, this precise separation between the poet and the non-poet does not seem at all possible to me'), which makes it possible to recharacterize the discourse of the historian or the philosopher as a form of authentic poetic expression; and an implicit critique of the philosophy of the subject: the author is less the master of his words than he is a receptive surface, a photosensitive plate on which texts or images surging up from the past reveal themselves."

- Philippe-Alain Michaud:  Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion