Love Quote by Jacques Maritain

Maritain’s line is a manifesto disguised as a definition: poetry isn’t a boutique skill of clever brains, it’s a full-body event. The insistence on “totality” reads like a rebuke to any culture that quarantines art into the tasteful corner of “aesthetics” while letting the rest of life run on utility. He stacks faculties the way a theologian lists attributes of the soul, but the list is pointedly messy: “blood” sits beside “intellect,” “instinct” beside “spirit.” That friction is the argument. If poetry is born only from reason, it turns sterile; if it’s only sensation, it becomes noise. Maritain wants the collision.

The subtext is also political in the broad sense: modernity’s habit of fragmenting people into functions - worker, citizen, consumer, brain - is, for him, a spiritual distortion. Poetry becomes a counter-technology, a practice that resists compartmentalization. Notice how “love” and “desire” are not treated as embarrassing impurities but as essential engines. He’s quietly rejecting the idea that disciplined thought requires the evacuation of appetite. Instead, discipline is what lets appetite speak without collapsing into cliché.

Context matters: Maritain, a Catholic philosopher navigating the twentieth century’s ideological extremes, argued for a humanism rooted in the person rather than the machine or the state. This sentence smuggles that project into artistic terms. Poetry, here, is not escapism; it’s evidence that the human being cannot be reduced without something vital going missing.