Benjamin Peret

Excerpt from "The Dishonour of the Poets," 1945.

Translated by James Brook.Printed in "Death to the Pigs, and other writings," University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

If one looks for the original significance of poetry, today concealed by the thousand flashy rags of society, one ascertains that poetry is the true inspiration of humanity, the source of all knowledge and knowledge itself in its most immaculate aspect. The entire spiritual life of humanity since it began to be aware of itself is condensed in poetry; in it quivers humanity's highest creations and, land ever fertile, it keeps perpetually in reserve the colourless crystals and harvests of tomorrow. Tutelary god with a thousand faces, it is here called love, there freedom, elsewhere science. It remains omnipotent, bubbling up in the Eskimo's mythic tale; bursting forth in the love letter; machine-gunning the firing squad that shoots the worker exhaling his last breath of revolution and thus of freedom; gleaming in the scientist's discovery; faltering, bloodless, as even the stupidest productions draw on it; while its memory, a eulogy that wishes to be funereal, still penetrates the mummified words of the priest, poetry's assassin, listened to by the faithful as they blindly and dumbly look for it in the tomb of dogma where poetry is no more than delusive dust.
Poetry's innumerable detractors, true and false priests, more hypocritical than the priesthood of any church, false witnesses of every epoch, accuse it of being a means of escape, a flight from reality, as if it were not reality itself, reality's essence and exaltation. But incapable of conceiving of reality as a whole and in its complex relations, they wish to see it only under its most immediate, most sordid aspect. They see only adultery without ever experiencing love, the bomber plane without recalling Icarus, the adventure novel without understanding the permanent, elementary, and profound poetic inspiration that it has the ambition of satisfying. They scorn the dream in favour of their reality as if the dream were not one of the most deeply moving aspects of reality; they exalt action at the expense of meditation as if the former without the latter were not a sport as meaningless as any other. Formerly, they opposed the mind to matter, their god to man; now they defend matter against the mind. In point of fact, they have brought intuition to the aid of reason without remembering from whence this reason sprang.
The enemies of poetry have always been obsessed with subjecting it to their immediate ends, with crushing it under their god or, as now, with constraining it under orders of the new brown or "red" divinity - the reddish-brown of dried blood - even bloodier than the old one. For them, life and culture are summed up in the useful and the useless, it being understood that the useful takes the form of a pickaxe wielded for their benefit. For them, poetry is only a luxury for the rich - the aristocrat and the banker - and if it wants to become "useful" to the masses, it should become resigned to the lot of the "applied," "decorative," and "domestic" arts.
Instinctively they sense, however, that poetry is the fulcrum Archimedes required, and they fear that the world, once raised up, might fall back on their heads. Hence the ambition to debase poetry, to deny it all efficacity, all value as an exaltation, to give it the hypocritical, consolatory role of a sister of charity.
But the poet does not have to perpetuate for others an illusory hope, whether human or celestial, nor disarm minds while filling them with boundless confidence in a father or a leader against whom any criticism becomes a sacrilege. Quite the contrary, it is up to the poet to give voice to words always sacrilegious, to permanent blasphemies. The poet should first become aware of his nature and place in the world. An inventor for whom a discovery is only the means of reaching new discoveries, he must relentlessly combat the paralyzing gods eager to keep humanity in servitude with respect to social powers and the divinity, which complement one another. Thus he will be a revolutionary but not one of those who oppose today's tyrant, whom they see as baneful because he has betrayed their interests, only to praise tomorrow's oppressor, whose servants they already are. No, the poet struggles against all oppression: first of all, that of man by man and the oppression of thought by religious, philosophical, or social dogmas. He fights so that humanity can attain an ever more perfect knowledge of itself and the universe. It does not follow that he wants to put poetry at the service of political, even revolutionary action. But his being a poet has made him a revolutionary who must fight on all terrains: on the terrain of poetry by appropriate means and on the terrain of social action, without ever confusing the two fields of action under penalty of re-establishing the confusion that is to be dissipated and consequently ceasing to be a poet, that is to say, a revolutionary