“Above all communism is a poetic vocation. Without poetry, without a burning, purifying altruistic fervor, communism is only a farce, the receptacle of all anger, of all plebian resentment, the decadent playhouse of sharks, of all the tragic pimps, of all Jews, performing their Talmudic imposture.”
130
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Louis-ferdinand Céline 88
French writer 1894–1961Related quotes

“When it's done with being graceful and poetic, language is meant to communicate, after all.”
Great Writing interview

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 362

The Paris Review interview
Context: Goethe called his work one big confession, didn’t he? Looking at his work in the broadest sense, you could say the same of Shakespeare: a total self-examination and self-accusation, a total confession—very naked, I think, when you look into it. Maybe it’s the same with any writing that has real poetic life. Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic—makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse, but we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share.

“Above all, the first act of Godspell must be about the formation of a community.”
Godspell Script Notes and Revisions (1999) http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/cugodspell/scriptnotes.html&date=2009-10-25+17:58:43
Context: Above all, the first act of Godspell must be about the formation of a community. Eight separate individuals, led and guided by Jesus (who is helped by his assistant, John the Baptist/Judas), gradually come to form a communal unit. This happens through the playing of games and the telling and absorption of lessons, and each of the eight individuals has his or her own moment of committing to Jesus and to the community. When Jesus applies clown make-up to their faces after "Save the People," he is having them take on an external physical manifestation that they are his disciples, temporarily separating them from the rest of society. But the internal journey of each character is separate and takes its individual course and period of time. Exactly when and why this moment of commitment occurs is one of the important choices each of the actors must make, in collaboration of course with the director. At the end of the first act, the audience is invited to join the community through the sharing of wine (or grape juice), mingling with the actors during intermission.

“All that is, all that can be, all that will be, and all that will never be are in a community.”
from https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/departments/complit/events/2020-2021/poetics---theory-graduate-student-conference--communities--imagi.html
Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Inaugural address (March 4, 1841)

“All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.”
Lapis Lazuli http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1522/, st. 2
Last Poems (1936-1939)