French philosopher Edgar Morin reflects on the origin and destiny of poetry, tracing its intimate connection with human thought, myth, science, and the mysteries of existence
Souad Khalil | Libya
This text is a translation of a lecture delivered by the distinguished French philosopher Edgar Morin in the summer of 1990 during the events of a World Poetry Festival.
In this profound lecture, blending philosophy and poetry, Morin reflects on the origin and destiny of poetry, tracing its intimate connection with human thought, myth, science, and the mysteries of existence.
He argues that the future of poetry lies in its very source—in that symbolic, mythical, and magical current that has nourished the human spirit since the dawn of history.
This is not merely an intellectual lecture, but a celebration of the poetic state, regarded as the essence of human dwelling and one of the highest forms of existence on Earth.
What is the source?
It is difficult to know and grasp; it lies hidden in the depths of human being, as in the depths of prehistory—there, where language first appeared, in the unfathomable recesses of that strange thing called the brain, the human mind.
I shall attempt to defend the following thesis: the future of poetry lies in its very source.
First, we must recognize that the human being—whatever his culture—produces two languages out of one: one is rational, experimental, practical, technical; the other, symbolic, mythical, magical.
The first strives for precision, demonstration, and definition. It rests upon logic and seeks to make its subject objective and verifiable.
The second, by contrast, uses indirect signification, analogy, metaphor—those halos of meanings that surround every word, every utterance—and it attempts to translate the truth of subjectivity itself.
These two languages can coexist, intertwine, or stand apart and face each other.
They correspond to two states: the first we might call the prosaic state, in which we try to understand, to think—the state that covers much of our daily lives.
The second, we may call the poetic state.
The poetic state can be expressed through dance, through song, through worship, through festivals—and of course, through the poem.
Fernando Pessoa once said that within us dwell two beings: the first, the real one, is the being of our dreams and imaginations, born in childhood and lasting throughout life; the second, the false one, is the being of appearances—the being of our speeches, our gestures, our social masks.
I would not say that the first is true and the second false; rather, both correspond to those two states within us.
And with the second state corresponds what the adolescent Rimbaud perceived so clearly in his famous Letter of the Seer: that it is not a state of looking, but a state of vision.
Thus: poetry and prose—these are the twin threads of our lives.
As Hölderlin said: “Man dwells poetically upon the earth.”
And I believe we must add: Man dwells poetically and prosaically at once.
Without prose, there can be no poetry.
Poetry becomes visible only through its relation to prose.
We possess this double existence, this double contradiction, in our very lives.
In ancient societies—those we now call “primitive,” that once populated the earth and shaped humanity, and whose last remnants are today being brutally extinguished in the Amazon and elsewhere—there was an intimate bond between these two languages, these two states.
They were mingled in daily life.
Work was accompanied by song, by rhythm: bells rang while the grain was ground, the gestures of labor were measured by cadence and melody.
Let us take, for example, the preparation for the hunt, attested to by prehistoric cave paintings—especially those in Lascaux, France—showing hunters performing magical rites before their painted prey.
But they did not rely solely on those rites; they used real weapons, real strategies.
They merged both worlds.
In our modern Western civilizations, however, a separation occurred—a rupture between the two states, between prose and poetry.
The human being, whatever his culture, produces two languages out of one:
One rational, experimental, practical, and technical;
The other symbolic, mythical, and magical.
Two ruptures have marked this duality.
The first rupture began with the Renaissance, when poetry became increasingly secular and worldly.
A second rupture appeared in the seventeenth century: a growing divide between a culture that became scientific, and another—humanistic, literary, philosophical—that still contained poetry.
As a result of these two separations, poetry became autonomous, independent—it became poetry for its own sake.
It detached itself from science and from technology, and by doing so, inevitably from prose.
It separated from rhythm—not in the musical sense, but in the mythical one.
Yet it continued to draw nourishment from its source: that symbolic, mythical, magical thought.
In our Western culture, as in human culture at large, poetry has become alien—an intruder among entertainment and pleasure—something reserved for adolescents, for women, for the “sensitive.”
It has been relegated, in many ways, to an inferior place, compared to the prose of everyday life.
Poetry, however, has known two great revolutions in its history.
The first was the Romantic revolution, especially the German Romanticism that arose as a rebellion against the invasion of prose, the utilitarian spirit, and the bourgeois world that flourished in the early nineteenth century.
The second revolution came at the dawn of the twentieth century: Surrealism.
Surrealism meant refusing to let poetry remain confined within the poem—within purely literary expression.
This was not a rejection of the poem itself (for Breton, Péret, and Éluard all wrote magnificent poems), but an attempt to return poetry to life—to everyday existence, to dreams and coincidences.
The Surrealists, as you know, granted enormous importance to chance.
It was a project to abolish prose from daily life, to reintegrate poetry into living.
This project had already been foreshadowed by Arthur Rimbaud, who admired the gypsy caravans and the altars of churches—who celebrated movement and wonder.
The Surrealists admired cinema too; they were the first to love Charlie Chaplin.
Thus, the abolition of prose from daily life, and the reintroduction of poetry into it—that was the first message of Surrealism.
But there was another revolution: not only against the prosaic world, but against the horrors of the First World War—from which came their revolutionary inspiration.
You know that André Breton sought to link the political revolutionary formula “to change the world” with the Surrealist poetic one: “to change life.”
Yet this adventure, inspired by the most intense aspirations, led also to delusions, to contradictions, even to the self-destruction of poets—when they submitted poetry to the authority of political parties.
Here lies one of poetry’s greatest paradoxes:
The poet must not imprison himself within a rigid domain—a closed field of wordplay and symbols.
The poet’s competence is total, multidimensional—it embraces the human and the political—but he must not let himself be subdued by political systems.
The poet’s political mission is, in essence, to transcend politics.
Thus, we have witnessed two great revolutions in poetry.
And today—at the end of this century, which is also the end of a millennium—what is the situation?
We are facing what I would call a flood of excessive prose.
This flood signifies a way of life that is financial, chronometric, fragmented, and destructive.
It is not only a way of living, but also a way of thinking—a form of specialized knowledge that claims to be able to handle every kind of problem.
This invasion of “hyper-prose” is bound to an economic, technological, bureaucratic current.
And under such conditions, this excess of prose has, in my view, created the necessity for an excess of poetry.
Another event marks the end of our century: the collapse—or rather, the self-destruction—of the idea of earthly salvation.
We once believed that progress was guaranteed by history itself.
We believed that science could only advance, that industry could bring nothing but benefits, that technology could only produce improvements.
We believed in historical laws ensuring the blossoming of humanity.
We imagined it possible to establish peace on earth—to achieve the happiness promised by religions.
Yet today we are witnessing the fall of that illusion: the recognition that no salvation is possible on this earth.
This implies abandoning the belief in inevitable human progress; understanding that there are no historical laws, that progress is not guaranteed—nor automatic.
Progress must be won, and whenever it is won, it can also be lost.
It must therefore be renewed without end.
As the Czech philosopher Panoka once said:
“Becoming itself has become problematic—and will remain so forever.”
We are inside this mysterious adventure.
The events unfolding daily around the world confirm it:
We are surrounded by night and fog.
Why are we lost in night and fog?
Because we have entered fully into the planetary age—an age in which countless interactions occur among all parts of the earth.
Today, whatever happens to the oil wells of Iraq or Kuwait concerns all of humanity.
At the same time, we must understand that on this small planet—our common home—we are lost in the cosmos.
And yet, we bear the responsibility of cultivating human relations upon this earth.
The religions and politics of salvation used to say: “We must be brothers in order to be saved.”
But today, we must say: “We must be brothers because we are lost.”
Lost upon a tiny planet at the edge of the sun, on the fringe of a galaxy, surrounded by a centerless universe.
We are here—yet we possess plants, and birds, and flowers.
We possess the diversity of life, and the infinite possibilities of the human mind.
This, now, is our only foundation—our only current, our only possible flow.
The discovery of our lost condition within this vast universe—brought about by astrophysical science—makes possible, today, a new dialogue between science and poetry.
Science now reveals to us a world that is once again poetic, even mythical.
It leads us back to the central philosophical questions:
What does it mean to be human?
What is our place?
What is our destiny?
What may we hope for?
The old space of science was once that of a perfect, mechanical deity: a closed universe, endlessly moved by a pendulum, without creation, without event, without surprise.
That machine, tragically perfect and lifeless, has been dismantled.
What do we now see?
We see a universe being born—perhaps fifteen billion years ago—from an explosion:
Time, light, and matter bursting forth from chaos, as though creation itself were a kind of cosmic poem.
Life, which once seemed trivial and self-evident, now appears infinitely complex.
We discovered that the tiniest bacterium, made of millions of molecules, contains within it the complexity of a laboratory.
Reality, which seemed solid and simple, has dissolved under the microscope of modern physics.
Space and time, once thought distinct, now mingle.
Astrophysicists tell us that this universe—where space and time seem separated—is more like foam,
a shimmering sea without boundaries, where no true separation exists between time and space.
Where, then, is poetry today?
We have come to understand—not only in poetry but in every field—that there is no longer such a thing as an “avant-garde,” in the sense of something necessarily better than what came before.
The new is not automatically superior.
Perhaps this is the real meaning of postmodernity:
That the cult of the new has become sterile.
The issue is not to produce novelty endlessly, nor to dazzle with innovation.
True newness is always born of a return to the sources.
Why is Jean-Jacques Rousseau still astonishingly modern?
Because he sought to return to the source of humanity—to the origin of property, of civilization itself.
In essence, all renewal must pass through the source, through the origin.
Beyond modernity, beyond postmodernity—these are secondary notions.
The essential goal of poetry remains the same:
to place ourselves in a second state—or rather, to make that second state become the first.
, Edgar Morin reminds us that poetry is not merely an art or a language, but a state of being.
It is the capacity to perceive the world from within, to discover both self and cosmos simultaneously, to return to the sources that have nourished us since the dawn of humanity.
In an age of accelerating events and intertwined knowledge and science, poetry remains essential—as a window onto meaning, a bridge between humanity and the universe, and a living experience of life, symbolism, and beauty.
In this vision, poetry remains free and open, carrying us from everyday reality to the poetic state—the state that allows us to feel the depth of our existence within this vast and complex world.
Read: The Poetry and the Renewal
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Souad Khalil, hailing from Libya, is a writer, poet, and translator. She has been writing on culture, literature and other general topics.
