Thinking modernist poetry today requires going back to the poetic after the finite aspect of the modern, and conceptualizing it not only in aesthetically autonomous terms, but also as a contingent dimension of language in which both the aesthetic and the aesthesic merge and operate. Thus, four moments could be recognized: the pre-logical moment, the formal moment, the dialectical moment, and mystical moment. These are not evolutionary stages, but they reveal many positions of the subject before the poetic experience. From there we are able to understand that poetry is the negativity in which the access to the word, apart from any referentiality, becomes what should give and refuse what has already been given. Poetry enables the absolutely difficult and even the strictly impossible.
Poetry; negativity; modernism