Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!

I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own buts of offal, for God’s sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretary’s office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day.

Thus the death of the novel is not just a fanciful idea, it has already happened. And we now know how the novel dies: it’s not that it disappears; its history stops: after that comes nothing but a period of repetition in which the novel keeps duplicating its form, emptied of its spirit. Its death occurs quietly, unnoticed, and no one is outraged.

I don’t know. I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on “progressing” as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.

But in that case, what does history (the mutable) represent for the poet?

In the eyes of the poet, strange as it may seem, history is in a position similar to the poet’s own: History does not invent, it discovers. Through new situations, history reveals what man is, what has been in him “for a long time,” what his possibilities are.

If “the poem” is already there, then it would be illogical to impute to the poet the gift of foresight; no, he “only discovers” a human possibility (“the poem” that has been there “a long long time”) that History will in its turn discover one day.

Kafka made no prophecies. All he did was see what was “behind.” He did not know that his seeing was also a fore-seeing.