CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY
51
ing reassurance and consolation, and the contr.adictory attempts to
explore the unheard of universe lying beyond nihilism, whose frontiers
Nietzsche had in vain tried to force.
The main reproach addressed to those poets who rose to promi–
nence during the Second World War as the voice of the Resistance,
is that they mixed up the card-game of poetry under the cover of
the national emergency. They are accused of having spoken as if
the world still (or already) possessed values, as if the rhetoric of
great sentiments belonged to the natural order of contemporary
things, whereas the eloquent language of
l'
engagement,
far from
being the direct echo of such values, represented but the shadow
of a shade. It thus turns into a suspect instrument
par excellence.
The
refusal to be further deceived about the authentic position of man
in
our time in part explains the more rigorous tone and technique,
the ethical and formal touchiness, the critical attitude characteristic
of much of post-war French poetry.
The post-war period of 1919, after the nihilistic episode of Dada,
had seen the rise of the Surrealist revolt: Andre Breton conceived
of his movement as "creating light." Today there are no such new
fireworks. The most significant poets of our time devote themselves
to a patient struggle against the darkness of the human condition as
it is, in real rather than surreal circumstances. A tone different from
that of the apocalypse or from militant heroism again became neces–
sary. But among the poets who came to the fore after 1945, this
tone still retains the echoes of the preceding trial period.
As
the pub–
lication, around 1946, of
Feuillets d'H ypnos,
and
Le Poeme Pulverise
evidenced, it is preoccupations of a moral nature which obsess the
poets of the past decade, exactly as they haunt the newer prose–
writers
(J.
P. Sartre,
A.
Camus, etc). This distinguishes them from
their predecessors. The increased awareness of
l'ecriture,
the taste
for poetic craftsmanship, so striking in Ponge or Char, reflect even
in their exaggeration, the reawakening of the ethical sense.
If
the heritage of nihilism remains at the center of present day
poetic consciousness, the poets who assume it do not allow themselves
any further escape or irresponsibility. Supplementing this moralism,
a new development of this decade is the disappearance, within the
nihilistic stream, of that intellectual aestheticism which gave its clas-
