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With regard to the examples of magic that
close the book, the only right I can claim to
them is that of translator and reader. I
sometimes think that good readers are poets as
singular, and as awesome, as great authors
them-selves. No one will deny that the pieces
attributed by Valéryto his pluperfect Monsieur
Edmond Testeare worth notoriously less than
those of his wife and friends.
Reading, meanwhile, is an activity
subsequent to writing—more re-signed, more
civil, more intellectual.
J.L.B.
Buenos Aires May 27,1935
Preface to the 1954 Edition
I would define the baroque as that style that
deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its
own possibilities, and that borders on selfcaricature.
In vain did Andrew Lang attempt, in
the eighteen-eighties, to imitate Pope's
Odyssey; it was already a parody, and so
defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its