When Chroniques de ma vie was published in 1935, Stravinsky sanctioned what has become his most famous remark: ‘Music is powerless to express anything at all.’ Even if he capitulated to the ventriloquism of his ghost writer Walter Nouvel on that occasion, Stravinsky's faith in the precept of objectivity, ‘perhaps the overriding feature of Stravinsky's modernism’, pervades his aesthetic manifesto, Poetics of Music (1942), to the extent that his ‘explanation of music as I conceive it’ is egoistically declared not to be ‘any the less objective for being the fruit of my own experience and my personal observations’. Objectivity, and its ascendance over what he called ‘the subjective prism’, was, or became, Stravinsky's distinctive habit of mind, an aesthetic and compositional position maintained in relation to any musical material, including his own free inventions. ‘What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallisation –’, he wrote in Poetics, ‘is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally submit to the law: Apollo demands it.’ Stravinsky's identification with the Apollonian – order, selection, construction, logic and unity – exemplifies the rationalising tendency within modernism and dominates, but does not expel, the Dionysian – freedom, fantasy, emotion, expressivity and irrationality.