Yves Bonnefoy has distinguished in the fields of art criticism and literary criticism. He is also renowned as a translator of William Shakespeare’s plays into French. His essays on art span the entire range from Byzantine to contemporary, from studies of the Renaissance and the Baroque to such works as Bonnefoy’s Alberto Giacometti: Biographie d’une æuvre (1991; Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, 1991), on the twentieth century Italian sculptor. Bonnefoy is not simply an academic critic; some of his most moving prose writing is that which ties the experience of the artist to the interior experience of the imaginative writer. In L’Arrière-pays (1972; the hinterland), for example, he combines insightful discussions of classical Renaissance paintings with meditations on the sources of inspiration he draws from his own childhood. The title’s arrière-pays (which brings to mind arrière-plan, the background in a painting, and which means, roughly, “back country”) allows for an extended meditation on the figures in the backgrounds of classic paintings and the feeling of well-being which Bonnefoy has experienced in his childhood and in his many travels.

This interior experience is Bonnefoy’s major focus in his literary criticism as well, from the essays in L’Improbable et autres essais (1959, 1980; “The Improbable” and other essays) to the monograph Rimbaud par lui-même (1961; Rimbaud, 1973) to the collections Le Nuage rouge (1977; the red cloud) and La Présence et l’image (1983; the presence of the image). Bonnefoy returns again and again to the idea that the images a poet uses, while in some sense unreal, are able to lead the reader to what he calls the “true place” of poetry. Thus the line “Ô Saisons, ô châteaux” (Oh Seasons, oh castles), which begins the famous poem by Rimbaud, becomes for Bonnefoy both a utopian dream and a reality which can be reached through language.

The philosophical issues that the poet locates in his artistic and literary researches are, in turn, fed back into his poetry, with the result that the poetry and the critical works come to mirror each other’s concerns. His collection of lectures, Lieux et destins de l’image: Un Cours de poétique au Collège de France, 1981-1993 (1999) is perhaps the most comprehensive compilation of his poetics to date.

Yves Bonnefoy is one of the most highly admired poets to reach maturity in France in the post-World War II period, and many would identify him as the most important French poet-intellectual at the turn of the twenty-first century. His early work had the character of being challenging and even hermetic, but it struck a chord with a whole generation of readers and poets. His poetry has always maintained the quality of being highly meditated and serious to its purpose. While his preoccupations are philosophical—death, the existence of the loved one, the place of truth—his poetic language is highly imaged and moves equally in the realms of beauty and truth.

The close association Bonnefoy has always maintained with visual artists who are his contemporaries has given him a high prominence in the art world as well. Though he maintains a teaching position in literature, he has tended more and more in his later career to pursue his interests in art and the theory of culture. His writings on art are prized both for what they say about individual artists and for the high level of reflection they bring to the subject of creativity.

Bonnefoy’s nomination to the Chair of Comparative Studies of the Poetic Function at the Collège de France in 1981 confirmed his position as one of France’s leading poets...