Yves Bonnefoy

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Yves Bonnefoy: First Existentialist Poet

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SOURCE: St. Aubyn, F. C. “Yves Bonnefoy: First Existentialist Poet.” Chicago Review 17, no. 1 (1964): 118-29.

[In the following essay, St. Aubyn discusses “similarities between Bonnefoy's approach to poetry and the existentialist approach to being.”]

Since 1953 Yves Bonnefoy has published, in addition to an earlier work he has subsequently preferred to forget, three volumes of poetry, a book on French gothic art, a critical biography of Rimbaud, two volumes of essays, and translations of at least three of Shakespeare's plays. His first significant volume of poetry appeared when Bonnefoy was thirty. His development would thus seem to have been a slow maturation which burst into full and prolific bloom. His poetry is serious, not to say somber, and evidences the obscurity and hermeticism of much of recent French literature. The study of Bonnefoy's poetry has been facilitated, however, by the publication of the two volumes of his essays, above all by the earlier entitled L'Improbable [abbreviated I] which constitutes his ars poetica, and to a lesser extent by the later volume, La seconde simplicité.

L'Improbable1 has indeed already been called the “Art poétique le plus important et le plus personnel qui se soit exprimé depuis les grands textes didactiques de Reverdy, de Breton et de Jouve.”2 Even the dedication cannot be overlooked since it announces many of the themes of Bonnefoy's poetry and provides a brief outline of his poetic theory. At first glance the essays themselves would seem to be extremely heterogeneous, for the subjects include the tombs of Ravenna, fifteenth century Italian art, the contemporary artists Balthus and Raoul Ubas, the writers Baudelaire, Gilbert Lely, and Valéry, as well as a chapter on poetic theory entitled “L'Acte et lieu de la poésie” and one entitled “Dévotion” which again announces many of the themes of Bonnefoy's poetry. Upon closer inspection, however, one finds that they all treat of artistic creation and provide important insights into Bonnefoy's own poetic creation.

The basic premise of Bonnefoy's theory is the desire to identify poetry and hope: “Je voudrais réunir, je voudrais identifier presque la poésie et l'espoir” (I, 149). Even Bonnefoy cannot tell us for sure, however, precisely for what poetry is a hope: “Il se peut que la poésie ne soit qu'espoir sans issue” (I, 47). He can only tell us that we owe to Rimbaud the sure knowledge that poetry is a means and not an end. Hope nevertheless has its reasons and means their ultimate ends. Poetry is after all something.

In revealing to us his theory of poetry Bonnefoy also reveals himself to be the most existentialist of poets, perhaps even the first true existentialist poet. Not only are many of his intellectual sources, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, frequently the same as those of Sartrian existentialism, but his poetic gods so to speak, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, are also those of existentialism. Even Bonnefoy's interest in fifteenth century Italian art parallels in a way Sartre's interest in sixteenth century Venetian art.3

Much more important however are the similarities between Bonnefoy's approach to poetry and the existentialist approach to being. Indeed the two approaches lead to the same thing. The shock of recognition that being exists outside consciousness is the same for Bonnefoy as for Sartre's Roquentin: “la surprise de l'homme devant le monde abandonné à lui-même, devant l'object réel apparu dans l'énigme d'une muette présence” (I, 169). For Bonnefoy as well as for Sartre no god sanctifies the created thing, no faith, no formula, no myth sustains it, it is but pure matter and pure chance. Even Bonnefoy's concept of time seems existential. Being is its past only in the mode of no longer being it and its future only in the mode of not yet being it, that is, it is nothing but its present: “l'acte de la présence, où le avenir qui vaille est ce présent absolu où se défait notre temps, tout le réel est à être, et aussi bien son ‘passé’” (I, 179). Bonnefoy along with the existentialists cannot agree with Plotinus who maintained that consciousness, far from being the essential foundation of being, is an accident, a diminution. For Bonnefoy “ce fond de l'être est intelligence et regard” (I, 71). For Bonnefoy as for Sartre in this world where all being is object for the look, “C'est comme si la vue était devenue substance. Et le savoir un avoir” (I, 173). There is no other way of knowing and this is as close to possession as we come. Both Bonnefoy and Sartre declare simply that being is, that being is in appearance, that the material object is nothing other than presence, and that presence is an act, the act of manifestation. As Bonnefoy puts it: “le monde sensible n'est qu'une action en puissance” (I, 28).

Bonnefoy shares the existentialist disdain for metaphysics. Bonnefoy, like Sartre, does not attempt to prove the existence of being. Neither writer is interested in useless conjectures on the possible source or sources of the phenomenon. Bonnefoy wants merely to name. He is interested only in concrete existence, “la description de ce monde que l'on pressent” (I, 27). The young creative writers in France today, the immediate heirs of existentialism, thus find themselves caught between two possibilities, two desires, “entre l'espirit de poésie et l'esprit de l'enquête méthodique, entre la frénésie, l'amour aventureux de certaines choses sensibles et la volonté de patience et de rigueur” (I, 119). Michel Butor has demonstrated that his attempts to reconcile these opposites led him naturally to the novel.4 To date the most obvious heirs to existentialism have indeed been the so-called “New Novelists” or “New Realists.” Bonnefoy is quick to disassociate himself, however, from this group. Their realism is not his. He feels that poetry is returning to “un réalisme profond. Lequel n'est pas—est-il besoin de le dire?—l'inventaire précis, ‘objectif’ nous assure-t-on, de ces romans nouveaux où celui qui parle s'efface” (I, 168-9). Bonnefoy is thus attempting to arrive at reality through his poetic creation just as Sartre attempts to arrive at it through his phenomenological ontology.

The reality of being has its necessary concomitant for Bonnefoy as well as for Sartre: “Le néant consume l'object” (I, 172). Being does not exist, only being and nothingness exist. Life is not simply life but life and death, and for Bonnefoy this fact is the true threshold, “le lieu d'accueil de ce qui est substantiel” (I, 165). This nothingness, this death is also a sign to man of his exile. To penetrate “le difficile réel” (I, 21), the young French poets have had to invent anew “les quelques gestes élémentaires qui nous unissent aux choses” (I, 168). They have had to create a poetry which effects “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 denouement, le réel” (I, 184). This “if” of reality is perhaps as close as poetry will ever come to reality, “if” indeed reality exists.

Bonnefoy analyzes at great length the means available to the poet for the expression of this reality. His condemnation of the concept as a vehicle for poetic expression is total. For him the concept is both a profound refusal of death and a flight. In company with Kierkegaard and most contemporary existentialists Bonnefoy condemns all static systems and lays their blame at Hegel's feet. He recognizes that there is a conceptual truth, but he also maintains that the concept in general separates man from the things of this world and in so doing lies: “On sait depuis Hegel quelle est la force de sommeil, quelle est l'insinuation d'un système” (I, 13) Any system which isolates man from his situation in the world which treats man in a vacuum, is a false system. Kierkegaard recognized the inadequacy of the system but took refuge from reality in his belief in God. Even Heidegger does not always escape the conceptual trap. If Bonnefoy admires in his writings “cette mort décisive, qui vivifie le temps, oriente l'être” (I, 12), Bonnefoy can give to Heidegger only an aesthetic or intellectual adherence since Heidegger uses death as a final resolution. The concept, since it attempts to found truth without death, denies poetry its true subject. The concept, far from being a means of revelation, is a means of concealment, an illusion. Discourse is linked to the concept and both lie in their attempts to produce an essence which is stable and sure and purified of all nothingness. For Bonnefoy, “Rien n'est que par la mort. Et rien n'est vrai qui ne se prouve par la mort” (I, 40). True discourse comes about only through poetry as a meditation on death: “Au moins la mort en acte fonde-t-elle le vrai discours” (I, 43). The concept as system is thus of no use to Bonnefoy in the creation of his poetry amidst the fleeting events and the eternal things of the world: “Y a-t-il un concept d'un pas venant dans la nuit, d'un cri, de l'éboulement d'une pierre dans les broussailles? De l'impression que fait une maison vide?” (I, 13). One might argue that the very word is concept, that image and metaphor are concept, in the end that poetry is nothing but concept. Bonnefoy is thinking primarily, however, of concept as system. Poetry, to express the true nature of being in the world, must go beyond the static system.

The Platonic idea or essence comes closer to capturing the reality of Bonnefoy's world. Bonnefoy is sure that the Platonic world of ideas exists, that there is to be found in all being “la substantielle immortalité” (I, 31) whose expression is the idea. For Bonnefoy Mallarmé was the first in French literature to attempt to capture this essence, this kernel of being. Mallarmé's faith lay ultimately in the word. He equated the word and the idea but his attempt was a partial failure: “Ce n'est pas l'Idée qui apparait dans la phrase, ce n'est que notre éloignement de la parole facile, notre réflexion si l'on veut, confirmation de l'exil” (I, 153). There remains the inevitable gap, the irremediable distance “du mot et de cette chose réele” (I, 139). Mallarmé however, unlike Valéry, demanded of poetry a future salvation and in his poetry he made a step towards being of which the Platonic idea is incapable since it rejects most of what Sartre would call the ontological structures of being: “la matiére, le lieu, le temps” (I, 139). The Platonic idea is in its way as deceiving as the concept since what it reveals is of a stable nature while the correlative of being is nothingness. Thus the idea is also inadequate for Bonnefoy's purposes.

For the concept and the idea Bonnefoy would substitute intuition. In place of a system Bonnefoy formulates what he calls a negative theology, negative because, just as Sartre bases much of his ideology on negation, so Bonnefoy does not reject that part of being which is “la négation où fonder” (I, 57). Bonnefoy hopes to capture all of this in what he terms “la vérité de parole, forme supérieure du vrai … La vérité de parole est au delá de toute formule. Elle est la vie de l'esprit, et non plus dècrite mais en acte. Originelle, issue du logis de l'âme, distincte du sens des mots et plus forte que les mots” (I, 37). The word is for Bonnefoy “la part intemporelle de la chose” (I, 121), “l'âme de ce qu'il nomme” (I, 149), “ce qui demeure de ce qui a disparu” (I, 180). Words are the substance of intelligence, our knowledge of reality: “de notre rapport avec ce qui est, la parole est-elle l'intelligence” (I, 183). Bonnefoy, like Sartre, makes such extensive use of religious terminology, God, conversion, sacrifice, spirit, salvation, grace, sacred, soul, that one is not surprised to find him, after Mallarmé, making a religion of poetry and constructing his own theology: “Théologie négative, elle substitute à toute divinité conceptuele cette présence de la réalité, sensible dans ce qui va se perdre.”5 In Bonnefoy's own words: “Une ‘théologie’ négative. La seule universalité que je reconnaisse à la poésie. Un savoir, tout négatif et instable qu'il soit, que je puis peut-être nommer la vérité de parole. Tout le contraire d'une formule. Une intuition, entière dans chaque mot. Et un ‘amer savoir,’ certes, puisqu'il confirme la mort” (I, 178). Poetry assumes the religious rites of salvation and redemption. The poetry of Lely, for example, is “la rédemption de ce qui se ruine” (I, 121). As the title of the final chapter of L'Improbable indicates, poetry is a “Dévotion” to the evanescent things of the world. Poetry is the religion of the finite: “Ce que nous aimions et qui meurt a sa place dans le sacré” (I, 151). To capture the reality of this passing but permanent being intuition must become the act of poetry, must become poetry.

As might have been foreseen from what has been said, Bonnefoy's fundamental intuition associates poetry and death: “La matière de la poésie après tant d'errances recommencéies est la méditation de la mort” (I, 139). To express it another way: “La mort dans son lieu d'élection et la parole attentive composent la voix profonde capable de la poésie” (I, 44). All three volumes of Bonnefoy's poetry are a monument to this dictum. Poetry is for Bonnefoy a combat, in Hegel's terms, “du médiat et de l'immédiat, du langage et de l'être, de la civilisation et de l'existence” (I, 52), “une incessante bataille, un théâtre oú l'être et l'essence, la forme et le non-formel se combattront durement” (I, 176). Poetry is the theatre for all essential action. The romantics had thought to fill their poetry with the whole world. Baudelaire was the first to change all that. Baudelaire replaced the theatre of the world in which a Hugo convoked the shadows of Napoleon and Canute by another theatre, “celui de l'évidence, le corps humain” (I, 43). With Baudelaire poetry came back to its true source, to the human body in a perceptible world. Baudelaire was the first to express this poetic and verbal truth in Les Fleurs du mal: “La vérité de parole est directement issue de cette rencontre … du corps blessé et du langage immortel” (I, 44). This is the theatre, the true place where another religious rite occurs: “Le vrai lieu est celui d'une conversion profonde” (I, 23). The true place is a threshold, a frontier. The true place is not an unforgettable yesterday nor an impossible tomorrow, the true place is this burning present, this here and now: “Le vrai lieu est un fragment de durée consumé par l'eternel” (I, 181). The true place is given by chance but here chance loses its enigmatic character. The anguish of the true place expresses itself in poetry: “l'angoisse du vrai lieu est le serment de la poésie” (I, 182). Again Baudelaire was the first in French poetry to invent death, “un aspect profound de la présence des êtres, en un sens leur seule réalité” (I, 162). Baudelaire did more than invent death, “il a inventé, lorsque Dieu pour beaucoup avai cessé d'être, que la mort peut être efficace” (I, 48). Baudelaire did more than describe the here and now in poetry, “le seul bien concevable, le seul lieu qui mérite le nom de lieu” (I, 175). He was the here and now. Only in the here and now of fleeting time where the act of poetry takes place can we go beyond time. Only by words do we arrive at the threshold of the true place. Only through poetry can we hope to arrive at reality.

Even the elements of Bonnefoy's reality are existentialist. One has only to remember Roquentin's “galet” to know that stone will be for Bonnefoy “le réel exemplairement” (I, 18). Sartre has suggested that he would like to establish a lapidary for Rimbaud.6 Bonnefoy's prose as well as his poetry offer an equally rich quarry. Roquentin's anguish in the face of the existence of the stone is Bonnefoy's: “De quelle gêne pour l'esprit peut être une pierre nue, soigeusement refermée, lavée par le soleil de toute idée de la mort” (I, 13). In speaking of the stones of Egypt Bonnefoy says “la vie massive de la pierre se conjoint dans ce miracle d'un présent où la mort n'est plus” (I, 20). He would even maintain that Egypt affirms through stone that the only future possible is in this physical world. The being of stone becomes for Bonnefoy the equivalent of the concept: “Que tel morceau d'une pierre morte, posée ici, dans son irréfragable présence, soit le plus strict équivalent de la généralité du concept” (I, 22). In speaking of the landscape of Raoul Ubac Bonnefoy says: “l'élément qui domine est une pierre cendreuse. Elle n'est pas le modèle … mais la chose méditée. … La pierre que dit Ubac est une métaphore de l'être” (I, 80). The stone is thus the first element of reality, one of “les objets les plus vifs de cette terre—l'arbre, un visage, une pierre” (I, 175), which assures man that in its present there is a future.

Again like Roquentin Bonnefoy remarks the being of the tree, “l'arbre qui meurt sans savoir la mort” (I, 113). In the tree, in the ivy, in the leaf, Bonnefoy finds salvation: “Je dirai par allégorie: c'est ce fragment de l'arbre sombre, cette feuille cassée du lierre. La feuille entière, bâtissant son essence immuable de toutes ses nervures, serait déjà le concept. Mais cette feuille brisée, verte et noire, salie, cette feuille qui montre dans sa blessure toute la profondeur de ce qui est, cette feuille infinie est présence pure, et par conséquent mon salut” (I, 29). Bonnefoy finds immortality in ivy: “L'immortalité qu'il y a dans la présence du lierre, bien qu'elle ruine le temps n'en est pas moins dans son cours. Conjonction d'une immortalité impossible et d'une immortalité sentie, elle est l'éternel que l'on goûte, elle n'est pas la guérison de la mort” (I, 30). All truth becomes possible “dans ce débris de lierre que j'ai tenu, dans le passage et l'écume” (I, 32). Another sign to be deciphered is the being of water, “l'énigme de la présence de l'eau” (I, 141). Eternity awaits us here also: “Il y a de l'éternté dans la vague. Fabuleusement, concrètement, dans le jeu de l'écume au sommet de la vague” (I, 31). He who attempts to join the things of this world, “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” (I, 31). There is the cry of the bird, the passing of the wind, the gesture which is eternal: “Qui n'est pas fasciné par ce temps physique où bat, comme la sève universelle dans chaque plante, l'intemporel dans le geste humain?” (I, 90). This vision of the world, this attempt to arrive at reality can only be called love: “L'affrontement de la connaissance intellectuelle et de cette invention de l'objet qu'on peut certest nommer l'amour” (I, 139). Thus for Bonnefoy the act of poetry becomes an act of love, love of this world which is all we have and which suffices to tell us that in “cette obscurité d'un instant qui est l'appréhension de la mort” (I, 15), if we look closely enough we will find eternity: “Un possible apparaît sur la ruine de totu possible” (I, 172).

One of Bonnefoy's most important symbols is the orangery which he uses to designate seventeenth century French classicism and more specifically Racine. Because the figure appears frequently in Bonnefoy's poetry, we must quote at length:

Et ainsi, je suppose, s'approchait-on, dans ce siècle
qu'on dit solaire et sur le sable qui crisse, des
orangeries fermèes. Car je les tiens pour la clef
eblématique, la conscience latente de cette époque,
elles que leurs grands fenêtres, sous l'admirable
plein cintre, ouvrent au soleil de l'être, elles qui
n'ont pas de parties sombres, elles qui préfigurent,
par ces fleurs et ces plantes exmplaires qu'elles
accueillent, le jardin mallarméen à venir—mais que
la nuit, ou le souvenir de la nuit, emplit d'un léger
goûte de sang, sacrificiel, comme si un acte profond
devait une fois y avoir lieu. L'orangerie française
est l'index de nuit, l'un des “mille chemins ouverts”
que Racine avoue, et plus encore ce moi vacant, cette
poésie classique elle-même, qui se connaît presque
mais sans agir, qui attend qu'une intuition l'accom-
plisse, et qui va exercer pour cette raison sans doute,
sur la poésie ultérieure, une irréductible fascination.
Il faudra venir à l'orangerie, appuyer son front à ses
vitres noires. Je vois un Baudelaire enfant dans le
jardin essentiel.

(I, 159)

The hothouse with its windows which are so many thresholds, so many frontiers, remains a place of symbolic growth where death is conceived only as the invisible, as an absence. Bonnefoy's task, the “acte profond,” is to make of this “essential garden” of classicism an existential garden. As one critic put it: “On voit bien que c'est le poète qui porte aujourd'hui l'avenir du réel comme du sacré, qu'il est le véritable interrogateur d'un nouveau classicisme alliant le spirituel, la présence et la lumière.”7 Bonnefoy's problem is to bring death into the orangery while maintaining the life of its fragile inhabitants. This he succeeds admirably in doing in his poetry.

To follow the development of these existentialist elements poem by poem would necessitate another article. We can, however, see how they help give form to each individual volume. The problem on Bonnefoy's first volume, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve [abbreviated D], is who or what is Douve. One of the earliest critics was also one of the most accurate when he stated that Douve is precisely what it is indicated to be throughout the poem.8 Another poet-critic whose knowledge of the Bible sometimes gets in the way of his better judgment, suggested somewhat peevishly that Douve was Abishag, the young and beautiful Shunammite who ministered to the aging King David with so little success.9 A third critic wondered whether, since Bonnefoy knows English so well, “the author has not been attracted by the linguistic and thematic proximity of the emblem of the Holy Grail, the Dove.”10 A glance at the table of contents resolves much of the mystery. The sub-titles come directly from Bonnefoy's poetic theory which was not available to the early critics. The first sub-title is the scene of all symbolic action, “Théâtre” (19 poems), the theatre we have already encountered where being and essence, the form and the formless will struggle so valiantly. Next come the two necessary concomitants of all theatre, the gesture, “Derniers gestes” (14 poems), those gestures which unite us with reality, and the word, “Douve parle” (14 poems), the fundamental intuition, “la vérité de parole” which expresses reality. The fourth section is again a place, this time the place of symbolic being and growth mentioned above, “L'Orangerie” (14 poems). Finally we arrive at the place, “Vrai lieu” (7 poems). The movement is clear: the long struggle, the attempt to find those gestures which will unite us with the reality of this world, the words which will express that reality, the passage through the orangery, a sort of purification in order to arrive at last at the true place. All that transpires in these various places reveals the geography of a state of mind, or better of a state of being which alone renders the creation of poetry possible for Bonnefoy.

The long title of the poem reminds one immediately of the fundamental idea of Valéry's Le Cimetière marin while Douve herself reminds one of Valéry's La Jeune Parque.11 Bonnefoy has somewhat grudgingly acknowledged his debt to Valéry but he also states: “Nous avon à oublier Valéry” (I, 145). Bonnefoy's attitude towards Hegel is equally ambiguous. The epigraph from Hegel at the head of his poem is both a help and a hindrance. A hindrance because a reading of the poem reveals it to be at least non-Hegelian in import while in L'Improbable Bonnefoy has revealed himself to be positively anti-Hegelian. The poem would seem to be much more existential than Hegelian but like the existentialists, Bonnefoy has perhaps taken almost as much from Hegel as he has refused. The epigraph reads: “Mais la vie de l'esprit ne s'effraie point devant la mort et n'est pas celle qui s'en garde pure. Elle est la vie qui la supporte et se maintient en elle” (D, 7).12 If Bonnefoy's method is not Hegelian, the quotation does nevertheless reveal to us the subject of the poem, does help to situate the poem. Not only does the life of the spirit contemplate death, it also maintains itself in and through death, the very crux of Bonnefoy's poetic theory. The movement and immobility of Douve is but another way of stating this passage back and forth between life and death, being and nothingness, being-for-itself and being-in-itself, to use the existentialist terminology.

The title of Bonnefoy's second volume of verse, Hier régnant désert [abbreviated H], also lends itself to an existentialist interpretation. Yesterday reigns because we are our past, but it is empty because we are our past only in the mode of no longer being it. Again the epigraph is a quotation from a German author. This time the idea: “Tu veux un monde, dit Diotima. C'est pourquoi tu as tout, et tu n'as rien” is attributed to “Hypérion” (H, 7). The quotation would seem to be a somewhat free adaptation from two paragraphs in the first part of Hölderlin's philosophical novel Hyperion of 1797 in which the hero in a letter to his friend Bellarmin quotes his beloved Diotima: “du wolltest eine Welt … Darum, weil du alles hast und nichts …”13 The world includes nothingness as well as being. In wanting both one may end up with all or nothing. In this volume we are still in the true place of the conclusion of Douve where the poet seems to be reaffirming all his gains up to this point.

The volume is divided into four sections. The first, “Menaces du témoin” (13 poems), recalls the many witnesses of Douve. The second, “Le Visage mortel” (19 poems), reminds us of the mortality of being, while the third section, “Le Chant de sauvegarde” (13 poems), offers some hope. The final section, “A une terre d'aube” (11 poems), is again the true place.

Bonnefoy's third book, Pierre écrite, is a much shorter volume with only nineteen poems, the same number of poems as found in the two longest sections of his first two books. The epigraph this time: “O Charidas, que sont les choses d'en bas?—Obscurité profonde” is a quotation from an epitaph by Callimachus the Alexandrian written for Charidas of Cyrene who was probably a Pythagorean philosopher. Bonnefoy had already quoted this epitaph at greater length in L'Improbable (I, 91). An epitaph as epigraph is peculiarly suited to this volume since its ambiguous title means both the carved rock of the tombstone and the “ardoises taillées” of the illustrating artist Raoul Ubac. In Pierre écrite Bonnefoy has brought us to the very door of the tomb. His cemetery is not, however, a mournful and lugubrious place but again the true place where the instant finds its eternity, where death finds its life, where poetry finds its source.

From what has been said it can be seen that Bonnefoy has to date contributed to French literature a poetic theory which is at the same time highly personal and profoundly spiritual as well as soundly realistic and gravely compelling. In it he dares to explore the single greatest problem of life which is death and to find in his explorations a reason for an enduring hope. His knowledge of literature, philosophy, and art, his familiarity with the ancients and the moderns, give his theory an authority which is rare in contemporary letters. His manipulation of the existentialist concepts of consciousness, being, nothingness, negation, and time, his use of phenomenological description, his rejection of the Hagelian synthesis and the Platonic essence, his emphasis on the being-in-itself of the stone and the tree and the role their being plays in being-for-itself, mark Bonnefoy as a man of today. From this general analysis of the existentialist elements of Bonnefoy's poetic theory we can proceed to the careful consideration of his poetic creation which it so richly deserves.

Notes

  1. To simplify notation the initial followed by the page number or numbers of those works of Bonnefoy which interest us here will be given in parentheses after quotations. All of his works with the exception indicted were published in Paris by Mercure de France:

    Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (1953): D

    Hier régnant désert (1958): H

    Pierre écrite, ardoises taillées par Raoul Ubac (Paris, Galerie Maeght, 1958): (I should like to express my appreciation to the Galerie Maeght for allowing me to consult a copy of this rare and beautiful book.)

    L'Improbable (1959): I

    La seconde simplicité (1961)

  2. O (livier de). M(agny)., in Ecrivains d'aujourd'hui 1940-1960, Dictionnaire anthologique et critique, ed. Bernard Pingaud (Paris, Grasset, 1960), p. 128.

  3. Jean-Paul Sartre, “From a Study on Tintoretto,” trans. Richard Howard, in New French Writing, ed. Georges Borchardt (New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1961), pp. 9-54.

  4. Michel Butor, “L'Ecriture, pour moi, est une vertébrale,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 5 février 1959, pp. 1, 7.

  5. Olivier de Magny, Ecrivains d'aujourd'hui, p. 131.

  6. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le néant, Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (Paris, Gallimard, 1943), p. 692.

  7. Manuel de Diéguez, “Yves Bonnefoy et la critique de style,” Esprit, XXVIII (décembre, 1960), 2128.

  8. Maurice Saillet, Sur la route de Narcisse (Paris, Mercure de France, 1958), pp. 191-192. Article dated November 1953.

  9. Jean Grosjean, “La Poésie. Yves Bonnefoy: Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve,Nouvelle Revue Française, II (1er septembre 1954), 511.

  10. Mario Maurin, “On Bonnefoy's Poetry,” Yale French Studies, No. 21 (Spring-Summer 1958), p. 19.

  11. Pierre de Boisdeffre, “Résurrection d'une Parque: La Poésie d'Yves Bonnefoy,” in Une Histoire vivante de la littérature d'aujourd'hui (Paris, Librairie Académique Perrin, 1962), pp. 606-608.

  12. The quotation in English translation reads: “But the life of mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures death and in death maintains its being.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York, Macmillan, 1931), p. 93.

  13. Friedrich Höderlin, Sämtliche Werke: III Hyperion (Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1958), p. 70.

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