[In the following essay, Bishop presents an overview of Bonnefoy's poetry, characterizing the poet as one of the most influential in modern French letters.]

Les mots comme le ciel
Infini
Mais tout entier soudain dans la flaque brêve(1)

From the publication in 1953 of his first major collection of poetry, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, Yves Bonnefoy has exercised a fascination and influence in the realm of French letters that, having steadily grown, may now be said to have reached their point of full blossoming. His importance in the history of modern French literature is quite assured and may well be deemed ultimately even greater than those responsible for the 1983 colloque de Cerisy devoted to his work clearly already think. Author of fine translations of Shakespeare, eloquent and profound writings on the history and nature of art and poetry, Bonnefoy has allowed his poetic, and his creativity to develop away from the strict confines of literary schools and even broad contemporary intellectual trends, and rather in loose, though intimate contact with powerful and solitary voices of both the past—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jouve, for example—and his own time: Jacques Dupin, Philippe Jaccottet, André Frénaud, André du Bouchet and others. His achievements in the realm of art criticism are, similarly, largely those of an inspired autodidact, and his recent appointment to the Collège de France bears witness not only to the brilliance of his enterprise but also to its dogged individuality. My aim here is to map the principal features of a poetics that has guided him both in his criticism and his creative writing from his earliest poetic utterances of Anti-Platon and even the Traité du pianiste, down through Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve and the determining proses of L'Improbable and Un Rêve fait à Mantoue, to the essays of Le Nuage rouge and the sweeping, slow majesty of Dans le leure du seuil. Whilst a good deal of material cannot be touched upon, the general rigour and constancy of Bonnefoy's poetics will in this way come clearly into focus, as, it is hoped, will also the complexity and multifacetted nature of his thinking and approach. We shall thus have occasion to speak of aspects of Bonnefoy's poetics such as the distinction between presence and concept, the significance of death, ephemeralness and imperfection, hope and love, withdrawal and assent, language considered as problem and solution, and so on. Our final appreciation will reveal a poet working, both through the articulation of his poetics and his poetic praxis, at the intersection of the infinite and the briefest of illuminations.

The very early texts of Anti-Platon, dating back to 1947, still retain something of that air of enigma and obscurity that Bonnefoy himself is troubled to dispel in his reading, twenty years after their initial appearance, of the poems of Hier régnant désert. At the same time, however, they clearly mark out the principal obsessions and concerns that will be repeatedly elaborated and refined in his later work, both poetic and critical. The liminal poem of Anti-Platon (D, 9) stresses immediately the essential role that the particular, the specific, has to play in Bonnefoy's poetics, the inescapable importance—the importance we must not escape from—of the ‘this-ness’ of the world and our experience of it, set against the shimmering chimera of Idea:

Toutes choses d'ici, pays de l'osier, de la robe, de la pierre, c'est-à-dire: pays de l'eau sur les osiers et les pierres, pays des robes tachées. Ce rire couvert de sang, je vous le dis, trafiquants d'éternel, visages symétriques, absence du regard, pèse plus lourd dans la tête de l'homme que les parfaites Idées qui ne savent que déteindre sur sa bouche.

(D, 9)

What seems to matter, then, to Bonnefoy, and from the outset, is this thing, yet all things potentially, things here, ‘stained’, used, caught in the ebb and flow of life, not withdrawn beyond its actuality. And we, too, are not casual, detached observers, cannot be. Our laughter is inevitably to be ‘bloodied’ and this very admixture, of the comic and the tragic, the uplifting and the anguishing, has much greater ultimate significance and ‘substance’ for us than the ‘perfect’, the purely notional. What we need to assume, then, as Bonnefoy confirms in the closing text of this briefest of poetic sequences (cf. D, 17), is the very fragility, the precariousness, of our condition, in short the death that lies attendant upon us all, that is a consequence of the ‘this-ness’ of our being and whose message, paradoxically of fullness rather than banal finality, is central to Bonnefoy's poetics in general and especially, as we shall now see in our analysis of ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ and Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, the earlier expression of it.

The 1953 essay ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ (D, 19-39) presents Bonnefoy's fundamental thinking with respect to our being-in-the-world, opposing as it does the simplicity of human salvation through our acts of presence, to the perverseness and sophistry of our dismaying tendency to ‘conceptualize’ the world and our being in it. In this perspective Bonnefoy moves to show that the concept always involves ‘un profond refus de la mort’ (D, 22); it always entails evasion, fuite, a denial of human destiny, an effort to erase the ephemeralness and danger of existence and replace them with ‘une demeure logique où les seuls principes qui vaillent sont de permanence et d'identité. Demeure faite de mots, mais éternelle’ (D, 22). Where lucidness in the face of the openness, imperfection and sheer hasard of existence should prevail, a drugged ‘idealism’ sidesteps the world in order to remake it, force it to cohere, systematize itself comfortably, reassuringly. ‘Y a-t-il un concept d'un pas venant dans la nuit’, Bonnefoy pointedly asks, ‘d'un cri, de l'ébranlement d'une pierre dans les broussailles? De l'impression que fait une maison vide? Mais non, rien n'a été gardé du réel que ce qui convient à notre repos’ (D, 23). It is at this point that Bonnefoy evokes the Ravenna tombs. Initially impressed by their ornamentation, he is tempted to see in them, in this memorial locus of death, merely another, regrettably typical effort to refuse presence, here death, in an act of embellishment, abstraction, transcendence. Art in the face of death, would seem to flee the latter's ‘truth’. And yet, Idea, embedding itself in stone, ‘risks’ itself (cf. D, 27), Bonnefoy soon realizes. The ornamentation of the tombs is denied evasion and transcendence by the truth, presence and particularness, ‘this-ness’, of an object that thus reaffirms passage, becoming, ‘une liberté qui se lève’ (D, 39), at the expense of (aesthetic) angélisme. Whereas conceptualization leads to an abandonment of what is, an abandonment that is ‘ennui, angoisse, désespoir’ in Bonnefoy's eyes, the Ravenna tombs provide an instance of insurrection of the world whereby ‘comme par grâce tout le vif et le pur de l'être dans un instant est donné’, and spirit and matter once more reach some precarious but joyous communion. In the place of the abstract generality of concept Bonnefoy offers us a'universality’ that always has its locus, its myriad loci, each depending upon our gaze, the use to which we put it (cf. D, 30), for the reciprocal exaltation and, as Reverdy would say, ontic ‘consubstantiation’ that self and world together can secure (cf. D, 31).² In place of absence, we are given presence, which puts us, at least fleetingly, in contact with that Baudelairean ‘unité profonde de tout’ (D, 34). And presence brings not the stupour of permanence and effete composure;³ it is on the contrary the epitomy of fragmentation and dispersal—yet a fragmentation and a dispersal that are. ‘O présence affermie dans l'éclatement déjà de toutes parts’, Bonnefoy exlaims with fervour, ‘dans la mesure où il est présent, l'objet ne cesse de disparaître. Dans la mesure où il disparaît, il impose, il crie sa présence’ (D, 35). Ontic depth, ‘toute la profondeur de ce qui est’ (D, 36), is not, then, to be found in the sterilized illusions and veiled, feeble ‘divinity’ (cf. D, 38) of our conceptualization of the world, but rather is evidenced by breakage and wound, passingness and vulnerability. The ‘immortality’, the universality, the eternity that haunts Bonnefoy offers neither perfection nor any absolute, for they are steeped in time, marked by death: ‘conjonction d'une immortalité impossible et d'une immortalité sentie’, he argues, ‘l'immortalité qu'il y a dans la présence du lierre est de l'éternel que l'on goûte, elle n'est pas la guérison de la mort’ (D, 37).⁴ It is important to stress, however, that in all of this, caught as he is in this essay in the abstractions of philosophical discourse, Bonnefoy's argument is restricted to this minimum. His ambition, his ‘devoir absolu’ (D, 32), is uncluttered, unpretentious, though utterly crucial: the affirmation of our being through a naming, a saying of presence. Poetry's function in this is serious, morally bound, privileged, uplifting. ‘Voici le monde sensible’, he declares, ‘il faut que la parole, ce sixième et ce plus haut sens, se porte à sa rencontre et en déchiffre les signes. Pour moi je n'ai de goût qu'en cette tâche, recherche du secret que Kierkegaard n'avait plus’ (D, 32). If there are obstacles in the path of such an ambition, as indeed there are in abundance,⁵ there is equally the buoying or at least conpensatory thought that it is only in following this path that our starkly beautiful salvation may be found. ‘L'acte de présence est en chaque instant la tragédie du monde et son dénouement’, Bonnefoy tells us (D, 35). So, too, homologously, for l'acte poétique.

In the same year that ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ appeared, Bonnefoy published his remarkable Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve and it is to an examination, firstly, of this determining and influential volume of poetry and, secondly, of that obscure but flickeringly brilliant subsequent collection, Hier régnant désert, that we now turn in order to see what, in actual poetic context, in the very acte poétique itself, continue to be the central obsessions, the fundamentals, of his poetics. The opening poems of Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve establish in effect immediately and forcefully the primacy of the imagination of death in this collection. Everywhere Bonnefoy is appalled by its ‘breakage’, filled with horror at its ‘musique affreuse’ (D, 56), yet oddly resistant to the apparent finality of burial, strangely enthused even by the bizarre chemistry of disintegration he so powerfully evokes:

Le ravin pénètre dans la bouche maintenant,
Les cinq doigts se dispersent en hasards de forêt maintenant,
La tête première coule entre les herbes maintenant,
La gorge se farde de neige et de loups maintenant,
Les yeux ventent sur quels passagers de la mort et c'est nous
dans ce vent dans cette eau dans ce froid maintenant.

(D, 61)

Everywhere, then, Bonnefoy is summoned by what flees, by what lies dark or is torn asunder (cf. D, 68) in death, by what he senses to be its problematic though centrally significant ‘logic’. Bonnefoy's attitude to death is thus less confused, ambivalent, radically divided, than simply clear-eyed, lucidly aware of the essentially paradoxical nature of this logic. There are two related factors at play here. Death, despite its ‘frightful’, ‘silly’ orchestrations (cf. D, 56, 52), is felt, throughout these intense poems, to be doubly positive. It is the one phenomenon that, for Bonnefoy, flings us back towards our existence, our leaking yet potentially full being-in-the-world. It provides that very point of anchorage, that totally irreversible attachment to the earth that, viewed falsely, inauthentically, evasively, death itself ironically has so often deprived us of. In short, it is the ‘bottom line’, the very fundament, of our life. Furthermore, so many texts of Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve succeed in bringing out what might, in fact, be thought of as a metaphor for this conception of death, but what may be equally regarded as an extension, an intimately related elaboration of it, namely the notions of continuity and cyclicalness that cling to this conception, death's ‘complicity’ with life. Douve may thus be ‘blessée confuse dans les feuilles’, but she remains ‘prise par le sang de pistes qui se perdent, / Complice encore du vivre’ (D, 51). (Douve's) being may be ‘undone’, but its undoneness is instantly reversed by an act of gathering initiated also by being this time construed as unconquerable: ‘Etre défait que l'être invincible rassemble, / Présence ressaisie dans la torche du froid, / O guetteuse toujours je te découvre morte / Douve disant Phénix, je veille dans ce froid’ (D, 53). Ravaged, insect-infested, caught in the dark process of earth's perpetuity, Douve thus still radiates joy (cf. D, 56), exults in her capacity for some stunning continuity and gritty illumination (cf. D, 56). Her precise, exact and still emanating presence is what strikes Bonnefoy, finally. Conveyor of the ‘cold secret’ of death she is, indubitably, essentially, yet there is an oddly crucial way in which Bonnefoy, in no spirit of false, empty, blind transcendence, it should be emphasized, sees this ‘dead presence’ as ‘vivante, de ce sang qui renaît et s'accroît où se déchire le poème’ (D, 62).⁶ ‘Il te faudra franchir la mort pour que tu vives’, he declares in a later poem of the same volume, ‘la plus pure présence est un sang répandu’ (D, 76). Death in this perspective becomes the threshold of existence, our ‘presence’ being, reciprocally, paradoxically, most perfectly ‘conveyed’ by its dispersal, its act of loss. And, in consequence, a shimmering field of mirrored equivalences is set up between what appear to be mutually exclusive, contradictory, antagonistic phenomena: being and nothingness, presence and disappearance, disintegration and assembly. If death is, of necessity, still what it always has been, its meaning is not. For the poems of Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve confirm, amongst other things I shall speak of later, not a frightened retreat from death but rather its firm, lucid embrace, its rooting of our being always in the movingness of existence, the rendering quasi-equivalent of the meaning of our true place of dwelling and the meaning of death's simultaneous ‘ruination’ and founding of this place.

Hier régnant désert appeared in 1958 and if certain of its poems inevitably echo the imaginative emphases of Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, other stresses emerge—albeit elliptically, bathed in a briefly flecked obscurity Bonnefoy himself is sensitive to⁷—to which we shall give out attention here. As with the purely ‘theoretical’ text of ‘L'Acte et le lieu de la poésie’ which was published in the same year and which will shortly be discussed in full, what always underpins the enigmatic discourse of this new collection is the role of language, of speech, poetry, in our existence. In one of the early poems Bonnefoy succinctly states the problem of language, its misuse, its purposelessness, its tendency always to be besides the point, and at the same time evokes allusively the healing we may bring to it:

Et pourquoi disons-nous d'aussi vaines paroles,
Allant et comme si la nuit n'existait pas?
Mieux vaut marcher plus près de la ligne d'écume
Et nous aventurer au seuil d'un autre froid.

(D, 137)

(The) language (of poetry), as Bonnefoy generally sees it, is thus characterized by loss, unhappy orientation (cf. D, 147), it is turned away from those phenomena of our human condition that, only, can restore its authenticity, its value, opting at once for an indifference and sterility in the face of the world's streaming rawness, and for a beauty that, whilst thought transcendent, is, rather, empty in the idealizing harmonies it procures. Such a beauty, ‘celle qui ruine l'être’, must be discredited, Bonnefoy unflinchingly, unremittingly argues, ‘déshonorée, dite coupable, faite sang. / Et cri, et nuit, de toute joie dépossédée’ (D, 153). Moreover, it is within the framework of this destruction, this dismissal, that the ‘inguérissable espoir’ informing all of Bonnefoy' writing asserts itself. The ‘torturing’ of beauty, of the beauty of (the) language (of poetry), is not a wanton, gratuitous act; the ‘blood’ spilled, the ‘scream’ echoing in the night air, are, precisely, of infinitely greater (in)significance than the hollow, ringing perfection of anything we may articulate for the sake of, in (oblivious) praise of, its mere ‘beauty’. ‘L'imperfection est la cime’, as the title of one of the poems of Hier régnant désert unambiguously affirms. The problem of language finds its solution in an unlikely fashion, for, essentially, it has arisen through a progressive perversion of its relation to being, experience, both the quotidian and the marvellous. Indeed the problem of language, and thus its solution, are profoundly ontological. And, in consequence, so many of the poems of this volume stress what we have seen already and shall continue to see throughout Yves Bonnefoy's writings, poetic or critical, namely the necessary imbrication of the logics of language and death (cf. D, 160), the turning of poetry's language away from its cosmetic effects back to the vital urgency of its elementary and elemental concerns, back to the frozen, broken simplicity of a nettle (cf. D, 158). Language's healing thus depends upon the birth of a new or renewed vision of its relation to presence, upon a new perception of the world as ‘une terre d'aube’ (D, 167), when, finally, ‘l'inquiète voix consent d'aimer / La pierre simple’ (D, 176). The second of the two poems presented under the title of ‘L'Ordalie’ delicately evokes much of this:

Je ne sais pas si je suis vainqueur. Mais j'ai saisi
D'un grand coeur l'arme enclose dans la pierre.
J'ai parlé dans la nuit de l'arme, j'ai risqué
Le sens et au delà du sens le monde froid.
Un instant tout manqua,
Le fer rouge de l'être ne troua plus
La grisaille du verbe,
Mais enfin le feu se leva,
Le plus violent navire
Entra au port.
Aube d'un second jour,
Je suis enfin venu dans ta maison brûlante
Et j'ai rompu ce pain où l'eau lointaine coule.

(D, 179)

In the face of continuing uncertainty the poet commits himself to an action that at least, risking all, meaning and world, ‘risks’ equally a seizing of something fundamentally human and crucial despite its otherness, its reclusion. Hiatus there no doubt is between being and language, but in the optic of Bonnefoy's poetics obstacle and setback are never held to be definitive. There dominates, rather, an atmosphere of possibility, accomplishment and reawakening. Speech, for Bonnefoy, can indeed enjoy its ‘homecoming’ and the simple communal gestures this affords.

If the poems of Hier régnant désert choose, as we would expect, a metaphorical mode of articulation of the message they seek to convey, the important essay ‘L'Acte et le lieu de la poésie’, whilst clearly more logically and cogently structured, often opts no less for an expression of its underlying principles that is poetically charged and most certainly at a remove from the dry linguistic or philosophic conceptualizations that abound today. Broadly, the essay moves from an assessment of the dangers besetting poetry to an affirmation of the latter's moral and ontological necessity—and feasibility, given certain things. The dangers that hem in poetry are constant, in Bonnefoy's view. Rooted in the past, they continue to plague the present. Essentially they are the dangers of hygiene and aesthetic, formalistic transcendence. Poetry thus may seek better to grasp satisfaction of the desire, the lack that inspires it,⁸ by ridding itself of the world, of death, of imperfection—all those factors Bonnefoy deems so crucial to poetic, and existential, well-being. Mallarmé, despite his brilliance and exemplary dedication, is, in this respect, classically, and all too influentially, guilty. Of course, his ambition was noble, worthy and founded upon a hope, but for Bonnefoy it was an old, outmoded form of hope and his entire life and work in some paradoxically, ironically didactic way—if only we can be alert to the lesson—‘a démontré l'échec de l'ancien mouvement d'espoir’ (D, 189). In endeavouring to escape what he held to be the ‘nothingness of everything’—a combination of words surely sufficient to make anyone, not just Bonnefoy, sit up and question one's thinking—Mallarmé placed all his trust in a phenomenon, language, poetry, that might save only ‘l'amande même de l'être’ (D, 188), but which, in fact, as he realizes himself only too well—and teaches us, despite all his other messages, Bonnefoy rightly stresses—cannot escape the nothingness, the exile that he would flee. Mallarmé may thus seek to be reborn in a higher plane, but his quest entails, in a sense disastrously, a poetry ‘qui est l'existence vaincue, élan par élan, désir par désir’ (D, 189). The danger of such a quest, for Bonnefoy, is in effect much graver than that thrown up by its failure, for only upon the recognition of such a failure can a new vigour flourish. ‘Tous nous sommes rejetés hors du havre de la parole dans un pays de dangers; où des pressentiments, d'ailleurs, et l'insatisfaction de beaucoup de grands poètes, reprendront sens et autorité’ (D, 190). This does not mean at all that the ‘failure’ of Mallarmé is all immediately sweetness and light for his heirs. On the contrary, a certain pessimism in his work, an avoidance of the ‘lessons’ of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, have prompted many to yield to ‘le désir d'une discipline pour se retraire de ce qui est’ (D, 199), to opt for une ‘un acte de pure forme, … ce que je veux nommer la mauvaise mort’ (D, 199). And it is here, precisely, in withdrawal from the ‘alternative’ dangers of existence—ephemeralness, precariousness, death—into a realm of false imaginary peace and harmony ‘où tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté’, as Baudelaire himself all too temptingly portrayed it,⁹ that the real danger, for the poet as for the (wo)man, manifests itself. Here, all is to be lost. In risking, in running the dangers of existence, all is to be gained. From such ‘welcome’ dangers everything may flow … once more. But for this new hope—articulated in contradistinction to ‘l'ancien mouvement d'espoir’, essentially misleading, inauthentic, evocative of the existentialist mauvaise foi, and doomed to failure—to prosper, the poet of the ‘post-divine’ age (cf. D, 187) must lucidly confront the human condition, ask the fundamental questions: what interests me, what do I really want, do I wish to ‘avoid’ death, a sense of loss, in the absent ‘divinity’ of some form, etc.?

If the answers to these questions are indeed not readily available, Bonnefoy uncompromisingly asserts: ‘Mais je ne doute pas que la poésie moderne—la poésie sans les dieux—doive savoir ce qu'elle désire pour, en connaissance de cause, juger du pouvoir des mots’ (D, 187). From lucidity only, then, Bonnefoy's essay argues, may flow a true hope, a hope that does indeed, as we have seen elsewhere, inspire his thought and direct his creative energies. From the opening lines of ‘L'Acte et le lieu de la poésie’, Bonnefoy's desire to restore hope to poetry, to render them identical even, is transparent (cf. D, 185). Moreover, the absolute availability of this hope, this possibility that is poetry, is, for Bonnefoy, blatantly evident, if only we can understand what we truly want and need. ‘Comment ne pas reconnaître’, he asks, quite rhetorically, ‘au delà de ses bergeries, le goût de la poésie pour quelque chose d'errant et de livide qui semble sous des arbres éternels le spectre de la limite que l'on voudrait oublier?’ (D, 130). The ‘new’ hope that we must ‘reinvent’ (cf. D, 202) does not thus float off into some into some thin, unbreathable ethereal atmosphere with its frozen crystalline forms; it anchors us, rather, in what may be thought of as the spirituality of our being-in-the-world, our limitless wandering among the leaden-hued limits of the earth. The poetry—the hope—that Bonnefoy proposes to us, offers us openness, future, movement, instead of congealment, past and sterility (cf. D, 213).¹⁰ Very nearly ‘un réalisme initiatique’ (D, 213) in the sense that it is ‘au point de connaître, dans son durable exil, ce que peut ouvrir la présence’ (D, 214), poetry, the poetry of Bonnefoy, the poetry ‘to come’, may thus finally attain to grace, truth, even beauty, providing it remains rooted in this fusion of hope and lucidness that Bonnefoy calls ‘cette ardente mélancolie’ (D, 213). Only within the bounds of this tensely interlocking relation can true poetry articulate itself. Only from the depths of his known poverty, his aware deprivation, can the crucial giving of a true poet come forth (cf. D, 213). Words themselves, as Bonnefoy argues Baudelaire came to understand, cannot constitute our salvation, which lies rather, as we saw in Anti-Platon, in our affirmation, and our love, of ‘la seule réalité, irremplaçable, qui est telle chose ou tel être’ (D, 195). Upon the ruins of such mortality there then appears, for poetry, for humanity, a loving and loved possibility (cf. D, 203). But here again it must be understood that no end, no ultimate solution, is implied. Openness prevails once more; poetry is open-ended in that it can only be movement towards, approach, means (cf. D, 199, 206). It can never, must never be what we want itself. It remains as search, never constituting in itself the object of our desire, ‘la vérité de parole étant une proximité’, as Bonnefoy puts it (D, 212), a continuing quest we assume as our moral, and ontological, duty.

In an effort to bring out at once the principal factors of the further elaboration of Yves Bonnefoy's poetics and the elements of constancy that always characterizes the latter, I shall now pass, over the critical pieces of L'Improbable with its penetrating and always personal discussion of Les Fleurs du Mal, and Bonnefoy's essay on Rimbaud, on to two other, somewhat later discursive pieces, both decidedly determining, ‘La Seconde Simplicité and ‘La Poésie française et le principe d'identité’. The first of these appeared in 1961 in the volume of that name, and later in 1967, in Un rêve fait à Mantoue, where the second essay was also published after its more or less simultaneous appearance that year with Maeght.¹¹

‘La Seconde Simplicité’ is a short but strongly felt and powerfully eloquent essay on—or rather declaration of love for—‘l'extravagance baroque’ (RM, 25). This predilection may surprise, although it will be well understood by those who have had the pleasure of reading Bonnefoy's superb Rome 1630: l'horizon du premier baroque published in 1970, and at all events will be seen to lie at the centre of his poetics. What appeals in the baroque is, essentially, as Bonnefoy declares at the outset, ‘la réaffirmation de l'objet sensible au coeur même, et combien vibrant, du vouloir propre des formes’ (RM, 25). Where law, number, the music of form might seem still to reign, ‘l'obscure gravitation charnelle’ imposes its simple human magnetism in defiance of Renaissance classicism, purity, formal and spiritual idealism. In the face of doubt about the very reality of reality itself, our being here and now, the baroque, ‘ce réalisme passionne!’ (RM, 25), unambiguously asserts its, for Bonnefoy, crucial love for ‘ce qui passe, ce qui est limité, ce qui meurt’ (RM, 25). With the baroque the absolute crumbles, ‘la joie imparfaite de la terre’ as well as ‘le tragique manque secret’ shakily, precariously, yet triumphantly announce their return to the minds and hearts of people. What Bonnefoy particularly, and perhaps most significantly, likes in baroque art, however, are those paradoxical instances where what he terms, precisely, ‘une simplicité seconde se fait soudain dans l'agitation consumée’ (RM, 25). Could it be that such instances denote a rearing of the all too beautiful head of abstraction and classicism, ‘la trahison d'une cause, la dissociation, une fois de plus dans l'histoire humaine, du souci de construire et du sentiment de la mort’ (RM, 26)? Bonnefoy opts finally for an optimistic view of things and prefers to see here, not a slippage, a retrograde hesitation, but on the contrary a supreme effort to marry idea and presence, perfection and imperfection, concept and death. ‘C'est ce baroque plus simple’, he proclaims, ‘qui s'approache le plus, par lucidité ou sagesse, de l'impossible unité’ (RM, 27). And it is this particular manifestation of the baroque that thus comes to represent for Bonnefoy that perhaps ideal and most legitimate conjunction of opposed, yet here mutually consenting, formal, aesthetic, spiritual ‘law’ and ‘la précarité temporelle’ or what he also calls ‘cette présence absolue, sans répit, que nous aimons dans la pierre’ (RM, 27).

The second of the two essays from Un rêve fait à Mantoue that will receive special attention here, ‘La Poésie française et le principe d'identité’, approaches, as might be expected, certain of the same haunting elements of his poetics we have heard Bonnefoy already articulate. But, once again, as with ‘La Seconde Simplicité’ new angles of observation open up enabling Bonnefoy to touch upon new factors and elaborate new stresses: the contrast, with respect to language, between its use and its ‘madness’, the logic of the invisible and the invisible in language, the distinction between analytical language and the language of desire, of integrity, and so on. One of the first observations Bonnefoy makes in fact—a central observation despite the rapid manner of his initial dealing with it—pertains to the nature and function of language in and out of poetry. The latter certainly does not entail a use of language. ‘Peut-être une folie dans la langue’, he suggests, ‘mais qu'on ne peut comprendre en ce cas que par ses yeux de folie—que par sa façon à elle d'entendre et prendre les mots’ (RM, 94). Essentially we find here, expressed in fresh terms, that decisive hiatus Bonnefoy sees yawning between the language of concept and that of presence. The former leads to the fragmentation of demonstration, the divisions and reifications of structure and reason; the latter offers a totality, an identity, a destiny that eschew all sectioning and reduction. The poetic act thus veers sharply away from assessment, analysis, even description, to become an acte de présence in, and through, words. Such ‘madness’ allows precisely for a gathering, ‘dans une surabondance où je suis pris et sauvé’, of a reality threatened with disassociation and disintegration (RM, 97). A restoration of place and unity thereby comes about which ‘justifies’ the world and operates a miraculous consubstantial ontological fusion, refusion, of self and world (cf. RM, 97).¹² From mere perception of the world—of ‘une salamandre’, for example—as an analyzable, rational object of attention, we thus proceed to ‘l'amour, qui est prescience de l'invisible qui est le vrai réel’, the world, the salamander, become suddenly visage, l'ange (cf. RM, 98), ‘la salamandre présente au coeur des autres présences’ (RM, 98). It is in this poetico-ontological movement of language, the establishment of that unity that is, indeed, présence, that the confusion of category, concept and segregation yields to the sweet order of existence and wholeness. Beyond its conceptual aspects, then, Bonnefoy feels, language does in effect offer the same ontic unity as being renders available ‘au delà des aspects qui ont fragmenté le sensible’ (RM, 99). ‘Tout langage’, he goes on to maintain, ‘est ainsi le champ pour l'élaboration d'une sorte d'ordre; pour la fondation d'un sacré dans le destin de celui qui parle; pour les efforts, au moins, d'une poésie‘(RM, 99). Not that this ‘order’, this ‘founding of a sacredness’ imply, by some legerdemain, the reinstatement of the principles of perfection, structure, heterocosmicity (i.e. the poem as other world, as object apart). They most certainly do not. As far as Bonnefoy is concerned the poetic ‘object’ founded upon, and perceived in terms of, such factors, constitutes merely ‘la dépouille … du poème’, whereas what interests him, and what only, he argues, can matter and mean, are ‘l'âme et le dessein du poème’ (RM, 100), the fact that it finds its—our—salvation only in the display of its integralness, its vibrant oneness, its dynamic, loving joining together of world and self within itself.¹³ This interlocking of self and world in some new consubstantial wholeness within the ‘space’ of the poem's language is, in effect, highly reminiscent of the poetics of Pierre Reverdy. And he, too, despite his earlier stress upon form, syntax and textual disposition, remains, like Bonnefoy, profoundly attached, finally, to the ontological and ethical criteria of the poem, rather than to the latter's aesthetic and structural essence. The vocabulary of the crucial passage closing the fifth part of Bonnefoy's ‘La Poésie française et le principe d'identité’ reflects this quite strongly: the poem offers justice, participation, consubstantiation, its most elevated moments allow us to glimpse a rare purity of evidence, to savour the liberation of the visible, to assume our—and the world's—true destiny (cf. RM, 100). Such a destiny, Bonnefoy declares, was constantly assumed by Rimbaud, whereas a Laforgue is torn between gravity, desire, and irony, between the compelling force of ‘l'identité intérieure de la présence’, as Bonnefoy says in his concluding lines (RM, 125), and the aspectual, reductive perspective that mar(k)s his work (cf. RM, 104-5). The great French poems of the Middle Ages, too, succeeded with utter simplicity and limpidness to ‘élaborer un monde et, en se faisant transparents, nous concilier l'univers’ (RM, 114), the ‘identity’ between poetic world and real world, langue and terre, attaining thereby to ‘son degré le plus haut de saturation substantielle’ (RM, 115), the invisible giving voice to the visible, the visible finding its true place of being beyond itself in the transparency of the invisible. The problem that exists now for the language and poetry—and the people—of France, a problem that has gradually worsened (cf. RM, passim, esp. 125), is that this ‘identity principle’, ‘si intensément vécu comme axe de participation, comme évidence de l'être, dans la poésie médiévale’ (RM, 116),¹⁴ relies upon a capacity for intuition that runs against the grain of, and has indeed been almost forgotten by, our developing tradition of thinking and being in, and with, the world. There is, in consequence, and before it is too late, an ‘order’ to be reinstated, one that will allow for the poet—and humankind—to exchange conceptual essence for presence, aspectual hollowness for interior profundity. Only in the light of this reinstatement, Bonnefoy proclaims, can existence take up its true form, finiteness go beyond itself to embrace the unlimited, truth be conjured with le sensible. Only then, through our act of love, can we refuse, ‘comme on purifie, ce qui fait le jeu du néant’ (RM, 120). Whilst seeming to be vast, and of course in a sense it is, Bonnefoy's project can be realized by a significant switch in perspective, and by a concentration upon what, finally, radically matters in our lives.

In passing, lastly, to an appraisal of the imaginative inspiration of Dans le leurre du seuil in the context of the poetics under consideration, we pass to what, undoubtedly, is not only Bonnefoy's finest poetic creation to date but perhaps the finest he will ever produce, for it ranks amongst the most magnificent pieces of sustained poetry of the twentieth century.¹⁵ It should be understood before proceeding to this necessarily compact account, that a number of other recent books and collections could equally well have merited and held our attention, especially given our present purposes: the somewhat earlier Rome, 1630 (1970) or L'Arrière-pays (1972), the various essays of Le Nuage rouge and the récits of Rue traversière, both published in 1977, or the very recent Entretiens sur la poésie (1981) which gathers together material of the past fifteen years.¹⁶ In choosing to conclude with a discussion of the 1975 Dans le leurre du seuil, then, we have opted, over the pressing merits of powerfully eloquent critical essays and intense shorter poetic proses, for the continuity and coherence of a great poem. Such a choice will, it is hoped, also remind us that, if Bonnefoy has written so much, so obsessively, about poetry, what matters ultimately is its practice from which its function may then flow. Moreover, in the case of this poem, as with Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, Bonnefoy offers us a superbly delicate imbrication of praxis and poetics, a self-reflexive creation whose passion embraces, and precisely according to his conception of ‘la fonction du poème’ (NR, 267) and the basic principles of his poetics, the interlocking, in a sense potentially equivalent, ontological natures of word and world.

The first part of Dans le leurre du seuil, entitled ‘Le Fleuve’ (DLS, 9-15), offers us an awakening, a suddenness of speech; it tells of a looking that is intent and imperative, at things no longer caught in some fictitious ‘forever’, ‘cet à-jamais de silencieuse / Respiration nocturne’, but flowing before the self and still signalling a possibility clearly crucial to Bonnefoy's poetics. Everywhere there is paradox, tension, ‘choice’, as we may like to think of it. Meaning may appear coagulated, somehow disastrously lost, blackly enigmatic, and yet the signs are still there. There is a fullness, even, a kind of perfection of form and substance in the world. There is, in short, equally, an evidence, and a feeling of certainty and joy that oddly persist. Here, Boris de Schloezer's death is, surprisingly, suddenly evoked, the bliss and illumination upon his face contrasted with those ‘eaux brûlées d'énigme’ that he left behind. The moment seems somehow to symbolize for Bonnefoy the jarring confrontation of a poetics of possible intuition and one of flat submission to the kaleidoscopic unfolding of incomprehensible acts and events upon ‘l'amère terre nocturne’. ‘Le Fleuve’, however, is a poem of traversal, navigation and difficult continuity.

‘Dans le leurre du seuil’ is the title of the second part of Bonnefoy's long poem (DLS, 19-35). Its tone, too, is imperative, one of unambiguous moral compulsion and unremitting forcefulness. ‘Heurte, / Heurte à jamais’, Bonnefoy begins, ‘Dans le leurre du seuil. // A la porte, scellée, / A la phrase, vide. / Dans le fer, n'éveillant / Que ces mots, le fer. // Dans le langage, noir’. The striking is, must be, persistent, an act of dogged continuity addressing itself to everything before us, world and word, in a effort to salvage le célébrable within. Bonnefoy is aware of the lateness of the gesture, certainly, but it is precisely this lateness that gives urgency to a gesture made against all the odds, often ‘blindly’ and in fatigue. It is important also to remain sensitive to the dual nature of the hammering, the ‘striking’ of the poet: it takes place in, upon, reality, primary experience, and in, upon, language, specific words. But, of course, these acts are essentially one and the same. Language may be holed, battered, devastated; the world's multiple ‘faces tournées vers nous’ may be plunged into silence. But, clearly, their separate healings are mutually dependent; the wholeness, the identity we have heard Bonnefoy speak of, can only come about through a therapeutic interaction or interpenetration whereby the sick and deprived heal one another. To achieve this cure, however, the necessity, the preciousness of the poet's/our continued listening and watching, Bonnefoy repeatedly writes, cannot be stressed enough. The empty noise of words, swept along in the wind, is, too, a constant anxiety in all of this. The time lived is not the time desired. It is still provisional, initiatory, transitional; a time, still, of hope and promise not yet—and indeed, Bonnefoy wonders, can it ever quite be?—beyond them. A time of striking ‘dans le leurre du seuil’.

The following two sections of Dans le leurre du seuil, ‘Deux couleurs’ (DLS, 37-43) and ‘Deux barques’ (DLS, 45-55), continue to elaborate the fundamental themes at play in Bonnefoy's poetics, though, of course, there is no logical, systematic development of thought finely parcelled out into the illusory compartments of some overall thesis. What he initially affirms, in that style of shimmeringly coherent ellipses articulating themselves at the intersection of the unconscious and a sense of their justesse, is at once the difficulty of the (poetic/existential) gesture and a confidence that still clings firmly to it. The search Bonnefoy and the poem itself initiate, takes place so that ‘la vie / De rien qu'un rêve’ may be born. Their joint human and poetic intention would match being with ideal, existence with dream—an ideal and a dream that, whilst central, demanding a focussing of our entire attention, are, it is essential to underscore, in a sense also minimal, mere, rien qu'un rêve, a crucially significant goal oddly veined with the paradox of slightness and even a certain insignificance well known to poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, André Frénaud or Michel Deguy.¹⁷ Despite a muddiness clouding our view of the threshold, the place of access, ‘l'arbre d'étoiles‘is glimpsed, definitely there, moving in the water; and the sense—and the need, both ethical and aesthetic—of a birth, a new life welling up within us is urgent and real. Despite, too, the ‘mauvais désir de l'infini’ that continues to make itself felt, Bonnefoy gives confidence to that impulse that bids him ‘consent’ to the mortality of the world, to go forth into ‘l'été mortel’, joining with it, erasing all dualities, dissipating, being dissipated, miraculously realizing ‘tard, l'inespéré, soudain’. In that movement, simple, crucial, access to an elusive yet briefly available peace and illumination becomes possible:

Paix, sur l'eau éclairée. On dirait qu'une barque
Passe, chargée de fruits; et qu'une vague
De suffisance, ou d'immobilité,
Soulève notre lieu et cette vie
Comme une barque à peine autre, liée encore.

(DLS, 51)

Bonnefoy's intuition, fleeting in itself, is of a fleeting yet sure phenomenon that speaks of plenitude and gentle adequacy. It is a phenomenon offering that quiet, almost inconspicuous transmutation of our experience, a transmutation edging us towards a sense of some marvellous otherness while maintaining an essential and firm attachment to substance and ‘evident’ reality—an experience, in short, of immediacy and transmutation, simultaneously.

The section of Dans le leurre du seuil that follows is entitled ‘La Terre’ (DLS, 57-75). It opens by picturing the poet shouting out his pressing, emotionally intense message to others, a message that urges them—all of us—to see the world, and the world, afresh, in the light of a simple though rich proximity that, rather than precluding an invisibility and a measure of eternity, on the contrary, and paradoxically, invites their collusion. In this new, or renewed, optic, ‘rien n'a changé, / Ce sont les mêmes lieux et les mêmes choses, / Presque les mêmes mots, / Mais, vois, en toi, en moi / L'indivis, l'invisible se rassemblent’. What Bonnefoy calls the ‘knotty’, ‘rent’, ‘forever earthy’ side of the human condition thus embraces, and is in a sense simultaneous, synonymous with, ‘la part impérissable de la vie’, and he can henceforth speak with passion and conviction of ‘l'à jamais de la fleur éphémère’ without any sense of contradiction insinuating itself into his words. Life, the earth, is, then, once again seen as offering a conjunction, even a superimposition, of the forces of passing and consumption, and those of continuity and (re)incarnation. The earth itself—and of course the poet in his reading of its signs—is a place at once of dispersal and gathering, death and celebration of the dying. In its myriad fading and dying movements, the world leaps continually into incandescence, its insignificance suddenly—yet all the time—significant, ‘toute une indifférence, illuminée’. And language, too, parole—that human, death-governed phenomenon—in passing, shines forth; in its brilliance, dies, but not without giving off its curiously persistent after-glow. The poet and the world—like all things and all people—in some freshly thought conformity with that poétique de l'éclair of René Char, thus conspire to be ‘l'un pour l'autre comme la flamme / Quand elle se détache du flambeau, / La phrase de fumée un instant lisible / Avant de s'effacer dans l'air souverain’. What already is, then, may in this way be revealed anew, yet reaffirmed, as what we had never quite understood it to be. ‘Oui’, Bonnefoy goes on, ‘toutes choses simples / Rétablies / Ici et là, sur leurs / Piliers de feu’. Everything, things and words, magnificently self-revealing at the moment of fiery farewell. What may be a source of anguish for others, the ‘nothingness’, as it were, of the being of world and word, thus remains a source of sober joy for Bonnefoy. His speech, his poetic utterance, may be a seemingly empty slobbering, ‘la salive du rien’, but, in the piercing purity of its articulation, it manages to bridge and heal and gladden.¹⁸

‘Les Nuées’ (DLS, 77-99) is the name given to the penultimate section of this long poem, with its obsessively voiced and criss-crossing lines of sense. It stresses, in a particularly important passage (DLS, 84-6), the need for faith and perseverance in the enterprise Bonnefoy proposes. Only if we show, despite all, what Sartre considered to be that clearly required faith in language, can meaning grow within our words and the earth be saved in that stunning process of birth and maturation whose reality and whose truth the poet dreams. Whilst, then, Bonnefoy never forgets ‘la misère du sens’, ‘la tache noire dans l'image’—those elements that force his poetics to the brink of the tragic—he has still, and especially in Dans le leurre du seuil, that grittiness and air of suffused confidence that, though never seeking to abandon this sober perspective, see the world, and its language, as a kind of Mother Courage leading forth things and words in the midst of their evaporation, their ‘woundedness’, their imperfection. Consciously endeavouring to thrust aside ‘la voix néante qui essaie de parler à travers la mienne’, the conceits and idle satisfactions the latter alluringly proposes, Bonnefoy's poetic act nevertheless builds itself upon ontological and linguistic defect and incompletion¹⁹ in a joyously impulsive movement towards the retention of this fleeting, maimed substance, in the lucid—and no longer simply ‘childish’—hope of rendering, if not meaning itself, ‘au moins l'idée du sens—à la lumière’. His poetics thus boldly, tragically and jubilantly, ‘assumes’ our insubstantialness, our cloud-like ephemeralness, our constant moving in and out of being/nothingness, in the intuition of a rock-bottom, minimal transcendence of the latter in that special place of conjuncture,

Quand nous passons
Déserts
Dans la vitre embrasée de ce pays
Qui ressemble au langage: illuminée
Au loin, pierreux ici.

(DLS, 98)

‘L'Epars, l'indivisible’, are the title words set before the closing pages of Dans le leurre du seuil (DLS, 101-21). They speak, as do so many texts of Michel Deguy or, again, Perse's last poem, Chant pour un équinoxe, of a scattering and division that are matched, even in a sense equated, with a special mode of unity and coherence that depend upon them. The text proper begins with an outburst of renewed affirmations which soon becomes a thrilling, restless, all-embracing litany of assent to the endless phenomena that gather their teeming diversity around, in and through, us, to constitute our being. In conformity with his poetics of an ephemeralness and death that illuminate, Bonnefoy seeks everywhere to confirm his approval and acceptance less of phenomena that seem to speak blatantly of fullness and wholeness than, for example, of that sun, that fire that lights up the world in its passingness, in its gleamingly traced and erased path through a world constantly giving fruit, giving birth at the moment of a death. ‘Oui, par ce feu’, he declares, ‘par son reflet de feu sur l'eau paisible, / Par notre lieu, qui va, / Par le chemin de feu sous le fruit mûr’. Being and nothingness are hence tied together, constantly jostling and leap-frogging each other, creating an energy, a warmth, a light that permit what can be to be in an act and time that simultaneously burst into life and die (cf. DLS, 114). And of course the language to which the poet aspires will mould itself to this conception of things. Nothing will be total, totalizing, systemic, symphonic, perfected either formally or notionally. What will remain will be ‘ces quelques mots que j'ai sauvés / Pour une bouche enfante’. Assent will be given to language, but only in its incompleteness, its imperfection: ‘Oui, par les mots, / Quelques mots’, he affirms. The gesture of poetry is not an All, an Absolute; it is merely—though crucially—a partial gesture, caught in time, even though straining beyond, better through, its particularness, towards some renewable, potentially (ever-)reborn meaning. This meaning, however, Bonnefoy repeats here, cannot be located in the closed space of a structure or what he likes to think of as an ‘image’. Such meaning is to be dashed upon the rocks to the benefit of a meaning in flux, open, holed and more recessed, one that must be preserved: ‘Et d'une main, / Certes, lever le fouet, injurier le sens, / Précipiter / Tout le charroi d'images dans les pierres /—De l'autre, plus profonde, retenir’. Moreover, in the key passage of ‘L'Epars, l'indivisible’ that immediately follows (cf. DLS, 116), Bonnefoy stresses the dangers of the imaginary heterocosm, the substitute, ‘other’ structure of the mind, in which we may erroneously seek refuge. No ‘building’ can truly occur, in effect; we must maintain, in simplicity and compassion, and yet profundity, a sense of ‘la dérive majeure de la nuée’, the deeply significant ephemeralness and ‘informality’ of it all—world and word. Pursuing ‘dans l'orgueil le néant de quelque forme’ is not, finally, worthy of humanity. Better, infinitely, to ‘atteindre à la terre brève’ and to ponder the sober yet profound lessons of its (in)significance. None of this implies that beauty lacks meaning (cf. DLS, 116-17). Despite death, beauty can gather the things of the world, in time; the ‘minimalness’ of being can be edged towards a simple yet spectacular maximum, as with André Frénaud. But it is not the beauty of what Bonnefoy thinks of as formal ‘repose’, the echoing empty chamber of words as form; but rather, through the ‘violence’ of the written act, a beauty affording peace with the world, yet ragged, raw, dying. Language, poetry, and the beauty and happiness they can offer, are yet, in all their illuminated ephemeralness, powerfully caught up in a sense Bonnefoy never loses and cares even at the close of his vastly majestic poem to underscore, of the endless process of reincarnation and continuity that complements that of death. His poetic assent thus affirms itself of necessity ‘par la vie sans fin / … / Par hier réincarné, ce soir, demain / Oui, ici, là, ici, là-bas encore’. The ‘wave’ that is at once life and language, thus obeys and mimes this logic, gathering itself, swelling into shape and fullness, spending itself, breaking and crumbling, in a continuous process of discontinuous being and becoming. ‘Les mots comme le ciel, / Aujourd'hui’, Bonnefoy quietly but intensely proclaims as he bids us farewell, ‘quelque chose qui s'assemble, qui se disperse. // Les mots comme le ciel / Infini / Mais tout entier soudain dans la flaque brève’. Language, poetry, like the world: breathing, rhythmically pulsing, mortal. But a mortality, a flashing briefness that reach, through their endless becoming, now, beyond themselves, towards an infinity bathed in the light of passing immediacy.

Notes

1. DLS, 121. The following abbreviations are used throughout: D: Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (Gallimard, ‘Poésie’, 1970); PE: Pierre écrite (Mercure de France, 1965 (1959); I: L'Improbable (Mercure de France, 1959); RM: Un rêve fait à Mantoue (Mercure de France, 1967); DLS: Dans le leurre du seuil (Mercure de France, 1975). Other books by Bonnefoy consulted include: Arthur Rimbaud (Seuil, 1961); Rome, 1630 (Flammarion, 1970); Rue traversière (Mercure de France, 1977); L'Ordalie (Mercure de France, 1974); Le Nuage rouge (Mercure de France, 1977); L'Arrière-pays (Skira, 1972); Entretiens sur la poésie (A la baconnière, 1981); L'Origine du langage, George Nama, 1980; La Présence et l'image, Mercure de France, 1983. The main critical studies of Bonnefoy are John E. Jackson's essay in the Seghers volume, Yves Bonnefoy (1976), Jérôme Thelot's Poétique d'Yves Bonnefoy (Droz 1983) and John T. Naughton's The Poetic of Yves Bonnefoy (Univ. of Chicago, 1984), though I have not yet seen the last two. The shorter critical work of Jean-Pierre Richard, James Lawler, Richard Stamelman, Graham Martin, Philippe Jaccottet, B. Arndt, Sarah Lawall, Richard Vernier, Roger Munier, Alex Gordon, Mary Ann Caws again, and others, has in varying measure contributed to my growing appreciation of Bonnefoy. Some of these studies appear in the important special issues devoted to Bonnefoy, of L'Arc (1976) and World Literature Today (1979). The actes of the 1983 colloque de Cerisy will also appear soon with SUD.

2. The notion of the consubstantiality of self and world, through poetry or artistic creation, is, as I have shown in the context of other poets examined here, central to Reverdy's aesthetics, for, despite his stress upon poetic margin, le poème-objet, transmutation, etc., art/poetry remains, not apart, but for the world, for being, and its continuing validity depends not upon hygienic removal from reality but permanent osmotic contact with it. This and other related ideas are elaborated in my paper for the 1983 colloque de Cerisy, ‘Bonnefoy et Reverdy’, to be published with SUD.

3. Somewhat like André Frénaud, Bonnefoy perceives specific, heightened experiences of presence as attainment less of the vrai lieu proper, than of something corresponding to one's desire for the vrai lieu, as a series of places of halt and repose. But the quest is, finally, endless, caught up in, even equivalent to, one's human (and poetic) destiny.

4. Cf. D, 37: ‘Qui tente la traversée de l'espace sensible rejoint une eau sacrée qui coule dans toute chose. Et pour peu qu'il y touche, il se sent immortel’. Saint-John Perse in so much of his work, and so splendidly in Anabase, is perhaps the one other modern poet who, in addition to Bonnefoy, so freely and deeply senses this imbrication of the sensible and the eternal, the changing, the dying, the imperfect, and the immortal, the immemorial that stares at us through the opaqueness of what is.

5. Cf. D,33: ‘La pensée conceptuelle; mais aussi la notion d'un Dieu aux exigences morales; hors de l'esprit un pouvoir de nuit qui s'infiltre partout en objets truqués, en forces impures, en choses laides: tels sont les principaux obstacles sur le chemin du retour’.

6. Again one may think of Reverdy whose poetic equation permits a quasi-transcendence of the ‘nothingness’ of given being via the establishment of the ‘true’, ‘real’ locus of being in the poem. However, Bonnefoy's position is clearly different in certain respects (the primacy of the sensible, etc.) and his central argument leads elsewhere: he is endeavouring far less to argue poetic transcendence, the virtues of the poetic locus as place of survival, than the significance of death for our real, sentient, breathing being. To avoid this, to side-step it, is, indeed, to die, but before temporal death, i.e. futilely, unwittingly, in illusion.

7. Cf. Bonnefoy' own note, written in 1969 and appended to the 1970 Gallimard ‘Poésie’ edition: ‘Toutefois, Hier régnant désert m'est maintenant obscur et, en quelques points, presque étranger Je l'ai un peu remanié par effort de le comprendre; et abrégé’ (D, 222).

8. For Reverdy this lack, this desire, basing itself upon the very emptiness of primary being, could only be satisfied, briefly, in part, imperfectly, by the boucheabîme of poetry, of art.

9. Cf. D, 214: ‘Le repos de la forme n'est pas honnêtement acceptable’.

10. As Bonnefoy says, poetry, this hope, ‘opère la transmutation de l'abouti en possible, du souvenir en attente, de l'espace désert en cheminement, en espoir. Et je pourrais dire qu'elle est un réalisme initiatique si elle nous donnait, au dénouement, le réel’. Here, in effect, Bonnefoy is manifestly closer to Reverdy in his reliance upon notions such as transmutation, the movement from the congealed, the dead, the incontrovertible, to the realm of a possibility, of renewed expectation, indeed of a poetic reality on the verge of mediating a consubstantiality, of allowing us to ‘have’, and truly to be with, primary reality.

11. Also in the Revue d'esthétique, juillet-décembre 1965.

12. ‘Le mur est justifié’, argues Bonnefoy in the same passage, ‘et l'âtre, et l'olivier dehors et la terre. Et moi, redevenu tout cela, réveillé à ma profonde saveur—car cet espace se voûte en moi comme l'intérieur de mon existence’ (RM, 97).

13. And not in the display, arrangement, organization, subtle expression of aspects of things and self, not in poetic objectification, reification, systematization, no matter how delicate, how intricate (cf. RM, 100).

14. Bonnefoy's essay on ‘Les mots et la parole dans la Chanson de Roland’, in Le Nuage rouge, is particularly illuminating in this regard (NR, 171-81).

15. This necessarily compact account of Dans le leurre du seuil is complemented by my forthcoming fuller assessment.

16. Or, indeed, the poems of L'Origine du language which, however, have as yet only appeared in the 1980 Georges Nama luxury edition, if one is to discount the translations of Susanna Lang appearing in the special number of Sub-Stance devoted to contemporary French poetry and edited by Philippe Denis (1979, 23/24, pp. 5-10).

17. I have endeavoured to show the importance of this shifting between these two extremes in the above studies of the work of Frénaud and Deguy in particular, and in an essay on Mallarmé (Dalhousie Review, 1982). With respect to Mallarmé, in particular, one might note Leo Bersani's contribution in his intelligent The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (Cambridge U. P., 1982).

18. Cf. DLS, 73-4: ‘N'étant que la puissance du rien, / La bouche, la salive du rien, / Je crie, // Et au-dessus de la vallée de toi, de moi / Demeure le cri de joie dans sa forme pure’.

19. Cf. DLS, 96: ‘… la parole / Etant inachevée comme l'être encore’.