"The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, XXXVII
Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the most grief-stricken and the most joyful.
idem, idem, LIX"
In Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, Vintage, London, 1998, p.269
