never pure

Mallarmé has been both an ideal and a dead end for poets. His greatness, Octavio Paz wrote [in The Bow and the Lyre (1975)], “lies not just in his attempt to create a language that would be the magic double of the universe—The Work conceived as a Cosmos—but above all in the consciousness of the impossibility of transforming that language into theater, into dialog with man.” Once there is nothing left but a few cryptic words for the initiates, what started out as a new understanding of aesthetics has turned into mysticism. A poem cannot be pure: it is a marriage of contradictions, reverence and blasphemy, asceticism and sensuality. As much as I admire [Roberto] Colasso’s uncompromising search for the heart of the poetic, I’m not convinced that such a search is the best way to go about writing poetry. The most attractive and puzzling aspect of the long history of poetry is that no conception of the poem is final.

—Charles Simic, “Literature and the Gods: Roberto Colasso,” The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015)

not ever pure

Guillén was aware that, whatever else, purely poetic poetry would be quite boring. And something more serious: it was linguistically impossible since language is by nature impure. A “pure poetry” would be one in which language had ceased to be language.

—Octavio Paz, “Jorge Guillén,” On Poets and Others (Arcade Publishing, 1986), translation by Michael Schmidt.

pure or purple

Pure poetry so often flirts with the purple.