THE GALLIC COCK
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and the most difficult sonnets hovering on the edge of the supreme
masterpiece,
Un coup
de des.
In brief, the history of the period, roughly 1850-1950, will some
day be seen as a series of jagged rises up to Mallarme with lower but
nonetheless proud ranges thereafter and the only comparable peak,
though laterally far removed, rearing up with the naturalized French–
man, James Joyce. The work of contemporary poets like Raymond
Queneau, whose theorizings have a distinctly Mallarmean flavor, and of
Michaux, who favors the Empedoclean myth of all the dispersed arms
and legs trying to get back together, may point to a new, as yet un–
glimpsed synthesizing genius. Surrealism will appear as a definite re–
treat into a kind of dissociation of sensibility-thus Cocteau, although he
is not the most typical, offers fascinating parallels with Alexander
Pope. Some surrealists, usually ex-ones, are inclined to put the poetic
universe together by taking an active hand in its apocalyptic eclipse:
thus Char, Eluard and various others in whose mouths the dllggcr is
held along with the purest and most angelic French sounds.
Raymond has brought much warmth of sensibility and sympathy
to several wonderful poets: Milosz, Apollinaire, Leon-Paul Fargue.
On the other hand, a somewhat academic eclecticism vitiates his
choices, and a chronological consideration or even sheer inertia seems
to have determined his inclusion of certain insipid members of the
Romanic school. An adequate critique (by one more competent than
myself) will further point out that he has given too little to Reverdy and
far too much to Claudel- in whom the religious attitude becomes
often inartistically grotesque or comic: in whom, as in St. John of the
Cross, religious enthusiasm leads to a rampant unconscious eroticism,
strewing his loud-shouted universe with misshapen sexual paraphernalia.
But, contrary to Raymond, if a Claudelian poem is quoted it will be
the magnificent primitive,
La
Vierge
a
midi.
Laforgue will emerge a
bit and Rimbaud cited a bit less often, though he continues to find
exegetes, at least, today. Finally the whole period will have to be
renamed to include Nerval, whose "only star" is most assuredly on the
ascendant.
When we look back over French verse of the last hundred years
or so, the most striking impression we gain is one of authority com–
bined with audacity. Harold Rosenberg, in his preface to the present
book, would accent the latter, but to my mind it is the combination
which counts-with the stress,
if
anything, on the former. Compare al–
most any major poem of the period with almost any American poem,
say
The Waste Land,
and we find that the latter, whatever its incantatory
