quote of the week

“His starting point was the idea that at one time men, when trying to emulate the gods in their manner of speech, had used a type of sacred language transcending the vernacular, and that was poetry. Just as the gods made their proclamations in poetry, so men petitioned the gods in poetic forms, too, and it was a vestige of such ritual that one saw in the poetic act today. When a poet wrote a poem he became a kind of god; even that man in the dark suit just now had fulfilled the same role, unknowingly of course, when he left behind that letter in the form of a poem. It may have been prose in origin, but an unconscious desire to be poetic had surely shaped its appearance. Poems are for people who seek to be gods; prose is for ordinary people. The one is ancient; the other modern.”
(Maruya Saiichi, A Mature Woman (1993))