Modernism and Theory by Stephen Ross, editor

“In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent…then come a crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communications. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes struggle forth) than against the ‘cliches’ of opinion.”

-Deleuze & Guattari, 1996