Claude
Vig~e
REVOLT AND PRAISE:
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY
The last decade of French poetry cannot be understood
in isolation.
It
must be interpreted in connection with the major
tendencies of Western sensibility manifested in the past hundred
years,
if
not since the beginnings of Romanticism and the anti–
Christian revolt of the Renaissance. There the seeds were sown whose
strange fruit Faustian man, evolving from classical rationalism to
romantic self-love and to modern nihilism,
is
still reaping. Poetry re–
capitulates, or reenacts within its own frame, the moral and spiritual
drama through which our entire culture passes. The seeming ob–
scurity of its present condition stems from the fact that poetry,
normally engaging the totality of values attached to earthly existence,
is now attempting to do it when an order of values and the very
notion of value are lacking in Western mankind. Poetry testifies for
man; it can only be what he makes of himself.
French poetry since the end of the eighteenth century exhibits
a remarkable continuity,
in
spite of the changes which have occurred
in its vocabulary, syntax, prosody, its use of imagery and symbols.
When we consider its main landmarks, the decades leading from the
Romantic world-flight to the Parnassian ivory-tower, and later to
Baudelaire and the Symbolists, from Mallarme's aesthetic nihilism
to the ascetic intellectualism of Valery, from Dada's radical negation
to the Surrealist's escape into the uncanny (which is but an extreme
regression towards the initial Romantic revolt) -these decades ap–
pear as phases of
transition
within a single temporal organism, which
is still under the spell of romanticism. Our own epoch continues the
main trends of the last two centuries, but in a form of its own.
It
does not prolong them; it brings them to their conclusion, and in
this sense stands in fundamental opposition to them.
