CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY
57
poets are not content to emerge with a revelation of death and noth–
ingness. Poetic meaning is for them the sense of a reconquered life
and a natural existence. "We must put things back into their right–
ful place," says Ponge. "Language, in particular, into its own."
(Proemes)
Such poets are men of transition, hampered by their
sophisticated heritage, half-hearted innovators; hence the stylistic
ambiguity of their achievements. Yet we witness in their work a true
metaphysical reversal which is also to be found in other literatures,
as in Rilke (in his last period), in Machado, in W. C. Williams, and
Jorge Guillen.
In
French poetry it is anticipated, before 1939, by
St.-John Perse, Supervielle and Milosz. Goethe's phenomenological
bent for the first time begins to bear fruit in the West:
Zum
sehen geboren.
Between the two contradictory formulae set forth by Rimbaud,
"Real life is elsewhere" and "We can't set out," the choice of the
generations who have gained poetic notoriety since the war goes to
the second. Hence the orientation of not only French but possibly all
of Western poetry is reversed.
On ne part pas on ne part jamais
pour ma part en Ue je me suis arrete fidele
debout comme Ie pretre Jehan un peu de biais sur la
mer
et sculpte au niveau du museau des vagues et de la
fiente des oiseaux
choses choses c'est
a
vous que je donne
ma foUe face de violence dechiree dans les profondeurs
du tourbiUon
. . .
Thus speaks, in a poem published in 1954, the Negro poet Aime Ce–
saire, who emerges from the Surrealist group, to which Rene Char
also belonged in his earlier years.
"It
is useless to start out," writes
F. Ponge, "one must transfer oneself to things."
This acceptance of Ponge's
ici-haut,
this openness to things,
whose part Ponge takes against a closed-in society, this risky surrender
of the self to the universe or to the divine presence, echoes also
among certain poets of the Christian persuasion. Rejecting the neo–
Platonic tradition, St. Augustine's dualism, St. Paul's wholly tran-
