Poetry Criticism | Char, René - Van Kelly (essay date 2001)

Van Kelly (essay date 2001)

SOURCE: Kelly, Van. “Suffering and Expenditure: Baudelaire and Nietsche in Char's Poetic Territory.” In Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity, edited by Patricia A. Ward, pp. 172-86. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Kelly analyzes Char's poem, “Baudelaire mécontente Nietzsche.”]

René Char's poem “Baudelaire mécontente Nietzsche” (“Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche”), which appeared in the 1972 collection La Nuit talismanique, begins with a contrast:

C'est Baudelaire qui postdate et voit juste de sa barque de souffrance, lorsqu'il nous désigne tels que nous sommes. Nietzsche, perpétuellement séismal, cadastre tout notre territoire agonistique. Mes deux porteurs d'eau.

(Char OC [Oeuvres complètes] 495-96)

[Baudelaire from his boat of suffering postdates and sees things...

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