Although one of the grand ‘unclassifiables’ of contemporary poetry, Michaux is one of its most significant and symptomatic figures. He represents a poetry not concerned with beauty or aesthetic order but with efficacy: that is to say, a poetry not content to contemplate or ornament, but which works for its living and becomes a practical act in his problème d'être, his difficult relations with reality. Hence his theory of poetry as ‘exorcism’, the purpose of which is to lay the innumerable ghosts which lurk menacingly in the recesses of the poet's sensitive interior or to ‘tenir en échec les puissances environnantes du monde hostile’. His fascinating imaginary countries, ‘Grande Garabagne’, the ‘Pays de la Magie’ and ‘Poddema’, elaborately described in the prose poetry of Ailleurs, are not escapist lands but what he calls ‘buffer-states’, thrown up by the imagination in the endless war between himself and reality, absorbing the shocks from both sides, and acting as a psychic necessity in what would otherwise be an irreconcilable situation. It is also a poetry which comes very close to scientific exploration, and in this, too, it is highly modern. Michaux's attitude in this respect is summed up in his epigraph to the collection, Connaissance par les gouffres, in which one could substitute the word ‘poetry’ for ‘drugs’: