82
PARTISAN REVIEW
Dans Ia poussiere du serieux
J'etablis des rapports entre l'homme et Ia femme
Entre les fontes du soleil et le sac
a
bourdons
Entre les grottes enchantees et !'avalanche
Entre les yeux cernes et le rire aux abois
Entre Ia merlette heraldique et }'etoile de l'ail
Entre le fil
a
plomb et le bruit du vent
Entre Ia fontaine aux fourmis et Ia culture des framboises
Entre le fer
a
cheval et le bout des doigts
Entre Ia calcedoine et l'hiver en epingles
Entre l'arbre.
a
prunelles et le mimetisme constate
Entre Ia carotide et le spectre du sel
Entre l'araucaria et Ia tete d'un nain
Entre les rails aux embranchements et Ia colombe rousse
Entre l'homme et Ia femme
Entre rna solitude et toi.
(La
Vie Immediate,
1932)
It is a limitation in Eluard that he is aiming at one kind of
poetry and producing another. Loose form and the continually
changed image must have beneath them-or rather, must rise from
the very existence of-a ground-swell energy, wildness and feroc·
ity in the poet. When the poetic gift is sensitive, and its projection
mild, on the other hand, it is form alone which gives edge to its
nuances. Eluard is far closer, as Jean Cassou has pointed out, to
the German poet's nostalgia and "suffering" than to the French
poet's sublimity and lucidity. And he is certainly more close, in
nature, to the Parnassians than to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or Lau–
treamont in all of whom ferocity is present. The French classic line
intersected, in Baudelaire, with the macabre and Gothic; classic
form was fused with passionate feeling and imagination and the
results are superb and inimitable poems. Rimbaud and Lautrea–
mont charged language with such force that it broke through form;
even Hugo's rhetoric was not adequate for these personalities. Even
in Mallarme the reverberation of emotion sounds through his
designs for fans, and his preoccupation with his furniture and
lace·curtains; the grandeur of glaciers, thunder and rubies invades
the poetry from which actual "meaning" has been barred. When
Rimbaud wished to express pathos, he immediately and instinc–
tively went back to form (in the poems
Bonheur
and
Chanson de
la
PluS. Haute Tour,
for example). The results of imitating a poet,
whose form is distorted because it is bearing more condensed
