Poetry is the indeterminate unity of a set of qualities that are not restricted to the kind of writing called “poetry”. The history of poetry is the history of poetry’s persistent refusal to allow itself to be identified with any given poetic mode or genre – not in order to invent one that would be more precise than all the others, or to dissolve them into prose, functioning as their ultimate truth, but in order ceaselessly to determine another, new exactitude. This is always necessary, every time anew, for the infinite is here and now an infinite number of times. Poetry is the praxis of the eternal return of the same: the same difficulty, difficulty itself.
Jean-Luc Nancy
