"Poetry, that is, converts the individual matters of which it speaks into generalities because it not only employs language as a means for communicating a specific content, but converts language back into its original substance. The function of language is preservation; what it embodies is meant to remain, to remain longer than is possible for ephemeral human beings. Thus from the start the representation, being destined for permanence, is stripped of its singularity, becomes an essence. ... Only in the wholly liberated purity of the poetic, in which all words are, as it were, spoken for the first time, can language become her friend, one to whom she is willing to entrust herself and her unprecedented life. ... Again and again his [Goethe's] words freed her from the mute spell of mere happening."

--Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen