Jacques Maritian's negative theology

...Rhythm, rhyme, line, stanza, all the clothing of words, of music, of human intelligibility, from which the poem seems to derive its consistency, none of that is what is sought for, all of that constitutes an obstacle to the research being pursued. Are we going to reduce poetry to the impossible in order to test its resistance, and allow only an ultimate sparkling gem at the point of death to survive? Shall we not rather enter into a kind of negative theology in which the hidden essence of poetry will be attained in an incommunicable experience, from which later we shall return among men, all the means of expression now being changed and purified, I mean to say as if burned from within, by a fire which will seem to annihilate them but which will liberate unknown energies in them?

The Situation of Poetry-Jacques and Raissa Maritain