Poets as Hostages of Eternity

There is no poet who has not dipped their pen in the ink of love. Infatuation is the beginning of poetry: it is at that moment that the universe begins to speak to a person in the language of eternity. But this is not eternity as something motionless and frozen; on the contrary, it is a living, creative process.
There are women connected to the cosmos, through whom inspiration flows, giving birth to art, science, and new technologies. A person who has experienced love becomes a poet in the full sense of the word: in their soul and mind, the law of the gods begins to sound, rather than the law of men. That is why they anticipate a new time and often come into conflict with the banality and conservatism of their surrounding environment. What is still a cocoon for others is already a butterfly for them. When everyone marvels in chorus at the "beauty of the king," the poet, like a five-year-old boy, says: "But the king is naked." This is the special quality of a poet — to speak the truth despite etiquette.
Erotic attraction enriches the spirit. A beloved person becomes infinitely precious, and losing them is equivalent to losing life itself. Love is a talent of the soul, and talent always leads to growth. It is no coincidence that they say: love is God. Even in Orthodox commandments, one can find the thought: “Seek the spiritual in the animal.” We can change the world, but we cannot change the laws by which it is governed.
Eros is the divine madness spoken of by Socrates, a sense of one’s own incompleteness, a source of poetry and philosophy. Eroticism is the yearning of a temporal being for the eternal. Divine aesthetics capture the soul, and therefore, after a poet has dipped their pen in the ink of love, they see the world in a different way. The law of love, the law of the gods, takes hold of them, and everything that violates this law provokes their wrath. The ancients rightly said: anger gives birth to the poet.
Plato distinguished two kinds of Eros. Eros-1 is the ideal of beauty, strength, and perfection. Eros-2 is lust, the instinct for reproduction, similar to hunger: it forces one to accept any sustenance, even imperfect, just to survive. There are also other forms of love: maternal, when a mother cares for a sick child and finds in it the meaning of her life; compassionate love toward the weak; attachments that nourish the soul.
Karl Marx wrote in The Critique of the German Ideology that the whole world is a struggle. But if one looks closely at the plant world, we see not only struggle but also cooperation, symbiosis, and mutual support. Therefore, the goal of poetry is harmony. True happiness is possible only in a harmonious world, where others are happy too. Real joy cannot exist when those around suffer. Only a sadist or a fool could feel well-being amid misfortune. That is why a developed individual is always political: they cannot confine themselves to their small private world. In Ancient Greece, this distinction was made between politicos and idioticos: the political person and the one concerned only with themselves.
The essence of poetry lies in the tension between the voice of the gods and the voice of the people. The poet stands in this in-between (Zwischen), both outcast and mediator. It is here that the question of what it means to be human and where one belongs is decided. Heidegger said: “Man lives poetically on this earth.” Poetry belongs to a particular time, yet it does not dissolve in it: its essence is that it is historical because it anticipates a new time. In this sense, the poet becomes a “hostage of eternity.”
A poet is not someone who lives in the past or the present, but someone who opens the future to humanity. Their word connects the divine and the human, the eternal and the temporal, harmony and struggle. Therefore, the poet is always a “hostage of eternity” — not as a dark sentence, but because they belong not only to themselves and their time. They become the voice of the universe, which through them reminds people of the laws of love, truth, and harmony.