Marina Tzvetaeva

Don't misunderstand me: I live not to write poems, I write poems in order to live. (Who would make writing poems an end in itself?) I write not because I know, but but in order to know. Until I've written about a thing (have looked at it), it doesn't exist. My way of knowing is through expression--there's the knowledge, right from under the pen. Until I've written a thing, I don't think about it. (You're the same, you know.) The pen channels experiences of what is extant, but dormant. Just as the Sybil doesn't know until the words come. The Sybil knows immediately. The word is the background of the thing in us. The word is the path to the thing, and not the other way around. (If it were the other way around, we would need words, not things, and the ultimate goal--is the thing.)

Marina Tzvetaeva, in a letter to Boris Pasternak, 1926