What madness says of itself was, for the thought and the poetry of the early nineteenth century, what dreams say in the disorder of their images; a truth of man, very archaic and very near, very silent and very threatening, a truth that underlies all truth, the truth closest to the birth of subjectivity, and the most widely spread at the very level of things; a truth that is the deep retreat of man's individuality, and the inchoate form of the cosmos: