a poem is a machine
In 1939, five years before William Carlos Williams said, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words,” Paul Valéry writes in his essay “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” that “A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words.”
“The effect of this machine is uncertain, for nothing is certain about action on other minds. But whatever may be the result, in its uncertainty, the construction of the machine demands the solution of many problems. If the term machine shocks you, if my mechanical comparison seems crude, please notice that while the composition of even a very short poem may absorb years, the action of the poem on the reader will take only a few minutes.”
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