Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.
“I am trying to discover things that I am not already conscious of. Rather than deal with experiences from my past which are already familiar to me, the excitement of writing poetry for me is to explore places that I have not already found. Heidegger says that to write a poem is to make a voyage of discovery. In the same way, I am always interested in my future poems rather than the ones which I’ve already written. The old ones really don’t do anything for me.”
John Ashbery