I conceived the chair as one of poetics, where I would continue a great reflection begun long ago on the biblical vision of the world : life-death-resurrection, or Eden-cursed earth-" new earth ", and on its power to explain the origin and finality of all forms of art and language, to irrigate philosophy, and to bring together in unity all that thought can grasp. I studied this ternary motif in Shakespeare's tragedies and Molière's comedies, and showed the search for renewal at work in the very act of writing, painting, composing music, and naming reality in words, all activities aimed at the glimpse into the world ofsomething else. I developed the concept ofanaktisis (re-creation), more exact and fruitful than Aristotle'smimesis, and that offoreignness, the strangeness of the foreign world we enter in the arts and in a single, well-understood word.

Thesubject matter was literature from Homer to Philippe Jaccottet, a number of artists and composers, and certain philosophical ideas - wonder, for example, happiness - especially relevant. A particularly fertile field was offered by the differences between English and French languages and literatures in the way they consider the relationship between language and reality, and, through works and especially poetry, name the world anew. Two contrasting ways of conceiving the self and the other, and, through diligent attention to syntax, syllable and sound, of bringing the search, in everyday reality, for an elsewhere to come.