Michael Bishop

An infinity of flashing briefness: The poetics of Yves Bonnefoy

From the publication in 1953 of his first major collection of poetry, Du mouvement et de I’immobilith 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 manifestly assured and may well be deemed ultimately even greater than those involved in the 1983 collogue 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 thought and art 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, Mallarme, Jouve, for example and his own time: Jacques Dupin, Philippe Jaccottet, Andre Frenaud, Andre 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 College 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 Bonnefoy both in his criticism and his creative writing from the earliest poetic utterances of Anti-Platon and even the Trait& du pianiste, down through Du mouvement et de I’immobilitk de Douve and the determining proses of L’Improbable and Un R&e fait h Mantoue, to the essays of Le Nuage rouge, the sweeping, slow majesty of Dans le leurre du seuil, and the brief but compelling poems of L’Origine du langage. 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 will also the complexity and multi-facetted nature of his thinking and approach. We shall thus have occasion to deal with 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-Platen, 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,