The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.