“Doubt is more intelligent than poetry, insofar as it tells malicious tales about the world, things we’ve long known but struggled to hide from ourselves. But poetry surpasses doubt, pointing to what we cannot know. Doubt is narcissistic; we look at everything critically, including ourselves, and perhaps that comforts us. Poetry, on the other hand, trusts the world, and rips us from the deep-sea diving suits of our ‘I’; it believes in the possibility of beauty and its tragedy.

“Poetry’s argument with doubt has nothing in common with the facile quarrel of optimism and pessimism. The twentieth century’s great drama means that we now deal with two kinds of intellect: the resigned and the seeking, the questing. Doubt is poetry for the resigned. Whereas poetry is searching, endless wandering. Doubt is a tunnel, poetry is a spiral. Doubt prefers to shut, while poetry opens. Poetry laughs and cries, doubt ironizes. Doubt is death’s plenipotentiary, its longest and wittiest shadow; poetry runs toward an unknown goal. Why does one choose poetry while another chooses doubt? We don’t know and we’ll never find out. We don’t know why one is Cioran and the other is Milosz.”

-Adam Zagajewski, 1945-2021
A Defense of Ardor: Essays