Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.