"The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep"
About this Quote
Maritain’s line turns self-knowledge into an echo chamber with metaphysical stakes. The poet, he insists, doesn’t “find” himself by introspection the way a modern self-help script would have it. He discovers himself only when the world strikes him hard enough to vibrate inside him. That verb, “resound,” is doing the heavy lifting: it makes the poet less a sovereign creator than a tuned instrument, a body whose interior life depends on contact with what is not-him.
The subtext is a quiet polemic against both romantic self-absorption and the thin idea of art as self-expression. For Maritain, a Catholic philosopher steeped in Thomism, the self is not a sealed container; it’s relational, oriented outward toward being. Poetry becomes a privileged site where that orientation becomes audible. “At a single awakening” suggests inspiration not as steady craftsmanship alone but as a sudden concurrency: the thing perceived and the perceiver arrive together, as if consciousness itself is co-authored by reality. He’s smuggling an epistemology into an aesthetics: knowing is participatory, not proprietary.
Context matters. Writing in a 20th century crowded with avant-garde formalism and growing psychological accounts of creativity, Maritain offers a third path: not art as pure technique, not art as private therapy, but art as a meeting point between the mind and the world’s givenness. The poet’s “sleep” isn’t just literal; it’s the dullness of a self cut off from real presence. Awakening is when the world gets inside you and, in the same motion, you finally show up.
The subtext is a quiet polemic against both romantic self-absorption and the thin idea of art as self-expression. For Maritain, a Catholic philosopher steeped in Thomism, the self is not a sealed container; it’s relational, oriented outward toward being. Poetry becomes a privileged site where that orientation becomes audible. “At a single awakening” suggests inspiration not as steady craftsmanship alone but as a sudden concurrency: the thing perceived and the perceiver arrive together, as if consciousness itself is co-authored by reality. He’s smuggling an epistemology into an aesthetics: knowing is participatory, not proprietary.
Context matters. Writing in a 20th century crowded with avant-garde formalism and growing psychological accounts of creativity, Maritain offers a third path: not art as pure technique, not art as private therapy, but art as a meeting point between the mind and the world’s givenness. The poet’s “sleep” isn’t just literal; it’s the dullness of a self cut off from real presence. Awakening is when the world gets inside you and, in the same motion, you finally show up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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