The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

introduction

xxxv

by what is carried in it. Walk poems, perhaps above all others, are modi-
fied by what the speaker carries or picks up along the way. Roger Fry, the
British art critic and painter, never traveled without a small volume of
Mallarmé’s poems in his pocket. Kenneth Rexroth and Frank O’Hara
carried small volumes of Reverdy’s poems, and William Carlos Williams,
one of René Char’s. We remember Williams’ credo associated with that
poet of brooding intensity and passion:

René Char

you are a poet who believes

in the power of beauty

to right all wrongs.

I believe it also.

......................

let all men believe it,

as you have taught me also

to believe it.∞π

Jacques Roubaud once walked alongside the Mississippi, carrying in his
pocket Mark Twain’s book about the great American river. Roubaud has
written about this experience and the musings it occasioned but has
chosen not to publish these writings for this reason: he has not yet re-
turned to the banks of the Mississippi. It always takes two moments of
seeing the same thing, he says, to really see it, ‘‘just as it does two eyes.’’∞∫
In any case, the poet’s pocket and the shape of what it bears may well have
replaced what we used to think of as influence. It is not what you emulate
but what you choose to carry with you that matters most.

Overview
With a backward glance at the nineteenth century we can now ap-
preciate the wide range of all that Symbolism is or was: Baudelaire’s blend of
romanticism and pre-Symbolism, Mallarmé’s extreme far-outness and orig-
inal mysteriousness, Arthur Rimbaud’s visuality in Illuminations and else-
where, including that shown in his great trip through poetry and the worlds
of adventure called ‘‘Le Bateau ivre’’ (The Drunken Vessel), which conveyed
the poem and its readers into explorations of the twentieth century.
Appropriately, Part 1 of this volume includes the work of two great
Symbolists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Saint-Pol
Roux and Paul Claudel. The work of Mallarmé’s disciple Paul Valéry
presents the link between Symbolism and post-Symbolism: his poetry is
marked by both classical form and classical references, along with a mod-
ern fascination with epistemology and human consciousness. In Valéry,
Narcissus and Psyche meet contemporary psychological meditation.