"Orpheus, the divining poet of stone, has always made me feel a profound nostalgia for a mythical ancient age of art and poetry. Nostalgia for an age when poets could really sing; an age when youths, bards—destined to decline into rhapsodes and finally into the scribblers we writers have become—used the living word with a divine voice. After this age there was no more psalmonising, no more presentiment, no more divination. No song, no poem, no art of today can truly shine once it has been compared to this first, great season of poetry."