Telemachy

All of a sudden we see a dog, a cab, a house, for the first time….This is the role that poetry performs. It unveils, in the fullest sense of the word. It reveals, naked, and lit by a light which arouses the mind from its torpor, all the surprising things by which we are surrounded, and which our senses registered mechanically….Take a commonplace, clean it, polish it, and light it so that it produces the same effect with its youth and freshness and spontaneity as it did originally, and you will have done a poet’s work.