Art & Creativity Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges slips a quiet provocation into a sentence that sounds like a benign history lesson. “Poetry remembers” treats the art form as if it has a mind, a body, a muscle memory. The verb matters: memory isn’t nostalgia, it’s reflex. He’s insisting that even the most typographically sophisticated poem is haunted by the old conditions of performance: breath, pace, a listener’s attention span, the slight theatricality of a voice trying to land a line.

The subtext is a warning to modern readers who mistake poems for purely visual objects, puzzles to be solved on the page. Borges, who lived among libraries and built whole fictions out of books, still points backward to the bard, the chant, the communal room. He’s also defending poetry’s strangeness: rhyme, meter, repetition, and incantatory phrasing aren’t decorative antiques; they’re technologies from an era when the poem had to survive without paper, carried in the body and passed between bodies.

Context sharpens it. Borges’s Argentina was a crossroads of elite literary cosmopolitanism and popular oral traditions: tango lyrics, milongas, gaucho ballads. Add his lifelong fascination with epic forms (Homer, Anglo-Saxon verse) and his later blindness, which made literature increasingly something heard as much as read. The line becomes less about origins than about authority: poetry doesn’t need permission from the page. It predates print culture’s gatekeepers, and it still works best when it’s allowed to sound like it knows that.