Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète is one of the authentic classics of the cinema, in the small group that includes Caligari, The Ten Days that Shook the World, some René Clair, and some Chaplin. It is perhaps Cocteau's own magnum opus, even if we compare it with Thomas L'Imposteur, La Machine Infernale, or Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde. And among the works of the '30's—a decade fairly arid in poetry and myth—it is one of the few landmarks, like Murder in the Cathedral and Finnegans Wake. I make these simple unanalytic statements of praise, because certain people at present disparage the poet Cocteau as a faker, a master of aesthetic sleight of hand and nothing more, and Le Sang d'un Poète itself as a pretty piece of legerdemain or at best as a myth purely private in its reference. (p. 24)

[That] I am right in calling [Le Sang d'un Poète] an allegory is evidenced extrinsically by Cocteau's preface, in which he tells the spectator that all poetry is a coat of arms whose symbols can be deciphered only after the expenditure of blood, and that he is dedicating the allegories of Le Sang d'un Poète to Pisanello, Paolo Uccello, Piera della Francesca, as painters of arms and blazons. Internal evidence is given by the prologue and epilogue of the falling tower, whose masonry has crumbled before the story proper commences yet whose collapse is completed only after the end of the story proper, so that the temporal expanse of the total action is comprised within the instant or brief interim elapsing between the two shots of the tower, that is to say, the total action is timeless or without duration and is therefore an allegory of eternal objects rather than a story of particular things. Furthermore, within the story proper the datelessness of the action is emphasized by the mixtures of period and costume, i.e., the studied anachronism in dress signifies that the action is not merely instantaneous or without duration but is not localized at any one point of time. Moreover, the machinery of events which obey laws other than those of the natural world, viz., the transsubstantiation of a charcoal mouth to a living, of a woman into a statue; the agility and levitation of bodies, in entering a mirror or flying to the ceiling; the disproportion between cause and effect, as the quick wasting away of the bronze statue beneath the snowballs; or the coexistence in one subject of contrary states, as life and death—all this serves to compose a world of miracles, that is to say, one where the system of causes transcends its phenomenal effects, or where the phenomena are merely the iconography for various relations among ideas. (pp. 25-6)

[Let] me make some cursory generalizations about the structure and content of the film—sticking fairly close to the literal level—before proceeding with a more detailed analysis. The falling tower serves formally as a symbol of a beginning and an end; and, in content, it introduces the theme of destruction in general and even, since the cause of the collapse of the tower is not shown, that of self-destruction. Now within the action proper, it should be noted that the relation of person to person or even thing to thing is usually that of victim to victor or agent to patient and that the crises in the action are often reversals of this relation…. [It] is evident that the separate incidents usually compose a unification of some or other contraries; and hence the whole film at first glance has a right to be considered, in the Coleridgean categories, as a work of the Imagination rather than of Fancy, even short of the exegesis of its iconography. (pp. 31-2)

[The film is divided, by subtitles, into four parts: La Main Blessée ou la Cicatrice de Poète, Les Murs Ont-Ils des Oreilles?, La Bataille des Boules de Neige, and La Carte Volée]. (p. 32)

The plot of La Main Blessée is essentially the destruction of an image or icon, viz., the erasure of the sketch, followed by the reception of a wound, viz., the mouth in the hand; and that of La Bataille des Boules de Neige is similar, viz., the crumbling away of the statue beneath the snowballs and the mortal blow sped from the hand of Dargelos…. The vivification of the statue by the wounding mouth in La Main Blessée, I do not count as a separate theme: for the original mouth is miraculous and unknown in its causation; consequently its appearances and transmutations will, in poetic probability, be many; while the mortal blow, as such, is one and final, and natural and determinate in origin. The plot of Les Murs Ont-Ils des Oreilles? is, I think, that of the journey through an unfamiliar medium, viz., the subterranean world behind the mirror, leading to a false suicide (at the instigation of a woman) and the false transformation of a man into a statue…. Similarly, in La Carte Volée the pilgrimage of the dead boy's guardian (he wears an apparatus for flying and swimming trunks and has a limp: hence walking on the earth is an unfamiliar mode of locomotion for him) leads to the true suicide of the hero, followed by the woman's turning into a mythical statue—which constitute a real glory as opposed to the false glory in Les Murs Ont-Ils des Oreilles? In brief, the theme of each might be epigrammatized as: the wound, the suicide, and the statue. (pp. 33-4)

The allegory of Le Sang d'un Poète (which Cocteau had once announced as La Vie d'un Poète) might be described, for the purposes of this essay, as "the pilgrimage of a poet." The linear story tells of a progress from being a Naive Poet, through various intermediate rôles, to being a depersonalized poet. La Main Blessée ou la Cicatrice de Poète tells of the progress from Naive Poetry to archaeology…. [The young man] is a Naive Poet because he is making a series of simple likenesses or improvisations. What, if any, relation there is between the mark of the wound and his gift as an artist, we do not know. His naiveté becomes sophisticated when he discovers that poetry is magical…. But the magical power of poetry is still limited by its nature as an imitation, and consequently it is an incomplete reality which it achieves, viz., a mouth and not a whole person or even face, that is to say, it is a monster. It is significant that he does not become conscious of this magical power, until there is a visitor or messenger from the outside world…. His discovery of the mouth in his hand is his recognition that, while the magical effect may reside in the poem, the magical power is in the poet himself. It becomes further evident that this power is in the poet himself. It becomes further evident that this power is daemonic, like another substance within him; for it is both rational, i.e., it talks to him, and erotic, i.e., it kisses. That is to say, the poet's pleasure in making poetry is both intellectual and symbolically sexual. For a short while he lives in communion with this power. But since he does not understand it (for its existence appears to him to be uncaused and miraculous) he still tries to deny it in some way. His transfer of the mouth to the pre-existent statue, I take to be a symbol of a compromise which he tries to effect, viz., he no longer tries to deny universally that poetry has daemonic and magical properties, but seeks to impute them to the art of the past, of which he becomes the interpreter or archaeologist himself. (pp. 34-6)

[The] poet in Les Murs Ont-Ils des Oreilles? finds himself a prisoner with the statue in a windowless, doorless room whose only aperture is a mirror. The mirror, let us say, signifies contemporary art (for art "holds the mirror up to life") as opposed to the art of the past, which was unrealistic (for the statue had no arms) and daemonic…. The allegory portrays only his relation to the theatre; for the four episodes in L'Hotel des Folies Dramatiques compose a comedy of the theatre in general and of the contemporary theatre in particular, at which he is a mere spectator as he peeps through the key-holes…. The four scenes through the key-holes signify four properties of dramatic poetry, represented comically or satirically, in respect to the contemporary drama: the first, viz., the fall, unfall, and fall again of the peon before the firing squad, signifies the reversal or peripety, which was the mainstay of the classical tragic plot but which in a debauched contemporary theatre is like a camera trick; the second, viz., the opium pipe and the Chinese eye, may signify seriously the property of mystery, which is inherent in all poetry, i.e., its inexhaustibility by rational analysis, so that the poem remains still looking back at reason, as the Chinese eye at the spectator; or comically, that the theatre is a spiritual opium, although as an imitation of life it may still be found to be looking back at you; third, viz., the flying lesson, the quality of sublimity, which in the contemporary theatre quickly passes into the ridiculous; and fourthly, the figure on the sofa and the false suicide, the confusion between a poetic imitation and reality—a confusion which may arise through the very nature of the theatre itself…. The moment of the suicide is the dilettante's attempt to imitate within his own life an artificial action; for it is at the command of the other figure that he aims the revolver and pulls the trigger; moreover, the semi-hypnotic and sudden manner in which he obeys also suggests that it is out of unreasoned imitativeness and not from reasoned choice that he commits the act. Furthermore, the generic act of imitating a stage drama is fabled as a suicide, because it is the imitation of an imitation and therefore the negation of his natural living. Hence the suicide must be a false suicide, because it is impossible to die a natural death merely by imitating an artificial action…. [In] attempting to persuade himself universally that the daemonic, magical power of poetry is non-existent and to deny the seat of this power in himself, he finds that he has transformed himself into something as lifeless and immobile as a conventional statue in a public square. This statue is really a false ego, which is formed out of the total suppression of the poetic daemon, and is consequently a statue within the soul of the poet, just as the partial inhibition of the poetic daemon, in transferring the living mouth from the hand to the plaster-of-Paris face, resulted in the daemonizing of an external object, our archaeological or poetic heritage.

Consequently La Bataille des Boules de Neige should be interpreted, I think, as a flashback: the recollection of the childhood incident in which the hero received his original wound—a wound in the heart which in his later forgetfulness appeared transformed into a scar on his shoulder. The wound was unrequited love—the death of the heart and of the child within himself…. This recollection of his childhood further destroys the statufaction of his ego which was caused by his ignorance of the relation between the developed daemonism of poetry and himself. In his imagination the figure of Dargelos has taken the place of the statue, because the ego is the repository of the privations of love. Consequently the loss of the love of Dargelos is the primary privation; and hence the ego-formation represented by the statue, which was caused by the final self-deprivation of poetic power (symbolized by smashing the statue of the woman) is dissolved on recognizing Dargelos, who returns a deadly snowball in answer to love, as the source of the primary wound. That is to say, as the smashed statue is to the statufied poet and as the slain child is to Dargelos, so is the daemonic power of poetizing to the poet manqué and the boyhood love to its unrequital. (pp. 36-9)

In La Carte Volée the hero is no longer statufied, i.e., he is no longer dominated by the false ego formed by his denial of the poetic daemon, but the possibilities of action still open to him are still limited by the ego formed by his original loss of love as a boy. He is now trying to be a man, viz., by making love to a woman—like all poets, before the eyes of a fashionable world which does not understand what is happening. But since the child in himself is lying there slain, his own heart dead, love can only be a game, conventional and nonspontaneous, played by means of mere symbols and outward forms…. [The] hero, as cut off from the sources of life represented by the boy, is himself nil in relation to the woman. Hence he can no longer be a complete man at all, but can only be man qua poet pure and simple, that is to say, his recognition of this reduction in humanity must be his symbolic suicide as a man. Similarly, the woman does not actually change into the statue, but her place is taken by the statue or muse …; for now the only possible fructifying relationship is between the poet and his muse or between the sculptor and his statue; the relation between man and woman has vanished…. The woman has now become transformed into the mythical formal schematism of a bust, and the temporally unfolded action is seen to lead to the idea of the "deathly boredom of immortality." The poet has attained his salvation; but it is the salvation of artifice, like Yeats's Byzantium, and neither natural nor divine, but constructed by a man after a laborious and heart-destroying discipline. (pp. 39-40)

Looking at Le Sang d'un Poète superficially, it is obvious that its aesthetic power resides in its special combination of simplicity of elements, enigma of intention, and a pervading sense of an underlying rationality. But as, in ethics, the principle of virtue may be formulated as: Act according as your maxim may be made universal; similarly in poetics, the principle of classicism might be stated as: Unify your content with such formalities as are universal in scope. For the actual plot of Le Sang d'un Poète is narrow in its significance. (In fact, it is paradoxical for a hero to be a poet. For a hero is some one who acts or suffers. But the poet as poet does not act or suffer but is the maker of fictions about those who act or suffer. Cocteau resolves this paradox by making poetizing the inevitable outcome of a sequence of actions and sufferings, like the death or calamity which was often the outcome of an ancient tragedy.) But the scope of the plot is universalized by defining its content in terms as powerful as the relation of victim to victor, of agent to patient (which is metaphysically the fundamental relation in all human action, whether the action be conceived as social or as occurring within the soul of one individual) and by unifying its plot-structure by the formal device of the reversal, which, as Aristotle argues, has a most powerful psychological effect, and which, as a mode of unifying poetic contraries in a time-scheme, distinguishes (in Coleridge's sense) a work of the Imagination from one of Fancy. (pp. 41-2)