62
PARTISAN REVIEW
ousness alone
is
interposed between man and the abyss. The certainty
of its renewal renders the passing of time bearable. Since Eluard's
death, Becker is the most original erotic poet of the decade. His cult
of love
is
of a metaphysical as well as sensuous nature.
In
carnal
intensity itself there resides for
him
a supernatural power, through
the medium of which poet and world are again welded together, in
the flash of a single moment.
In
Becker's poetry love has not only,
as for almost all other poets descending from nihilism, the power
of masking man's atrocious destiny, of throwing a temporary dis–
guise over the ever-resurging void. Eros alone transmutes into a poem
the hopeless prose of life in the daily hell of cities. "The sky pos–
sesses its real hue / only above your head." Becker's poems are writ–
ten in monochord quatrains. They have a subdued sonority, and re–
veal a glimmer of suppressed imagery like that of embers smoldering
under ashes. The ambivalent attitude of the poet towards the exist–
ence which inspired them is also reflected in his awkward rhythm,
constantly turning against itself, in uneven, irregularly rhymed me–
ters, each one suggesting an impulse arrested at its very start.
Alain Bosquet's poetic position is founded upon a perpetual
paradox. "Why write?" Bosquet asks himself in
Le
Defi
du
Cristal,
an unpublished text dated
1952.
Because tomorrow at dawn we shall all be pulverised. Unable to save
anything whatsoever, unanxious to 5ave anything, already crossed out
of time, swallowed up by space, I at least throw this challenge at my–
self: to write a few lines which translate the serenity, the humanism,
the tolerance of which neither my skin nor my blood is still capable.
. . . He who speaks of prestige speaks of responsibility.... I want my
poetry to be dense, difficult, revised, postponed until tomorrow: form
-i.e. the trouble I took to write, to hesitate, to erase, to modify--con–
stitutes the safest defense I could oppose to a murderous today... .
Poetry: a faith which feeds on analyses. Poetry: a scepticism which does
not accept the far too easy solution consisting in the denial of all solu–
tions. Poetry: a ruthless discipline imposed on the most complete chaos.
. . . Perfection, you are my guillotine, and you save me. ... To be total,
such is the law which replaces the former password: to be new.
In
my own poetry too, the polarities previously described are
clearly visible. My first book,
La Lutte avec l'Ange
(1950),
was
written under the shadow of the Second World War, between
1939
