‘Before and beyond it [poetry] there was prose, and it was non-poetry; it was non rhythmical, unbound but not disengaged speech, unmeasured but not extravagantly fulsome (masslos übermässiges) word. All poetry which has since come into being within the circle of its light is inspired by its prose spirit. Since that time in the dark silence that surrounded the beginnings of mankind the door which separates each from every other and all from the Outside and the Beyond has been broken and never again will it be altogether closed: the door of the Word’. – Franz Rosenzweig, cited in Kornelis Heiko Miskotte, When the Gods are Silent (trans. John W. Doberstein; London: Harper and Row, 1967), 204.