Char, René - Van Kelly (essay date winter 1995)
Van Kelly (essay date winter 1995)
SOURCE: Kelly, Van. “The Elegiac Temptation in Char's Poetry.” L'Esprit Créateur 35, no. 4 (winter 1995): 59-70.
[In the following essay, Kelly addresses the tension in some of Char's poems between past and future in perspective and focus.]
Laissons l'énergie et retournons à l'énergie. La mesure du Temps? L'étincelle sous les traits de laquelle nous apparaissons et redisparaissons dans la fable.
—René Char, “Riche de larmes”
Life and death vie fiercely in Fureur et mystère (1948), especially in the section subtitled Le poème pulvérisé, which contains a number of texts written from the Munich crisis through the Purge.1 Virginia A. La Charité notes that a paradox informs this era in Char's creation: “To live is to act, but every act appears menaced by the flux and destruction of the world.”2 The poems...
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- Introduction
- Principal Works
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Criticism
- Kenneth Douglas (essay date fall-winter 1948)
- Wallace Fowlie (essay date 1958)
- Times Literary Supplement (review date 21 October 1965)
- Paulène Aspel (essay date spring 1968)
- Virginia A. LaCharité (essay date 1968)
- Virginia A. LaCharité (essay date spring 1976)
- Mary Ann Caws (essay date 1977)
- Mary Ann Caws (essay date 1977)
- Paulène Aspel (review date spring 1980)
- James R. Lawler (review date spring 1984)
- John Porter Houston (essay date September 1985)
- Virginia A. LaCharité (essay date 1989)
- Charles D. Minahen (essay date fall-winter 1989)
- Michael Worton (essay date 1992)
- Jean Starobinski (essay date 1994)
- Michael Bishop (essay date 1994)
- Van Kelly (essay date winter 1995)
- Van Kelly (essay date 2001)
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