part 3. 1931–1945: prewar and war poetry
fascination for several in the Surrealist group. Joyce Mansour was part of
the group until Breton’s death.
Surrealist poetry, marked by images and grammatical structures in
unlikely confrontations, often has an unforgettable intensity: among its
greatest practitioners were some extraordinary love poets, perhaps the
greatest being Robert Desnos—known for his facility in sleep-trance ex-
periments and remembered for his tragic death, in his early forties, in the
concentration camp of Terezin. Paul Éluard, the great lyric poet, André
Breton, the founder of Surrealism, Philippe Soupault, Michel Leiris,
Louis Aragon, and Benjamin Péret all wrote poetry in verse and prose of
unmistakable emotional strength—recognizably Surrealist in feeling.
The youngest of them, the Provençal poet René Char, was introduced
to the Surrealist group by Éluard. Through his startling prose poem
‘‘Artine,’’ he gained entry into their ranks. Char participated in the dem-
onstrations of the Surrealists until deciding to go his own way, free of any
group or movement. Much contemporary poetry in France and Fran-
cophone countries has been, explicitly or implicitly, influenced by Char’s
strong and diverse poetry—from his love poems, noble and erotic, to his
poems of resistance and poetic revolution. His tone dominated French
poetry during the middle of the century, beginning with his Moulin
premier (First Mill) and Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer with No
Master), the latter set to music by Pierre Boulez. Through his powerfully
expressed wartime notebook of courage, Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of
Hypnos, or Hypnos Waking, in two di√erent translations); the majestic
panoply of poems in Fureur et mystère (Furor and Mystery); the love
poems and vivid local settings of Les Matinaux (The Dawnbreakers) and
Le Nu perdu (Nakedness Lost), Char showed a seigneurial impatience and
force that modified our view of the long-su√ering romantic poet and lent
a particular momentum to his writing: ‘‘J’ecris brièvement. Je ne puis
guère m’absenter longtemps’’ (I write in brief. I can’t absent myself for
long).∞ Many of us—critics, poets, and translators alike—have tried to
emulate Char’s marriage of concision and presence.
There was, and is, a great deal of a√ection for this generation of poets.
Several among them demonstrate a lyricism that appealed to readers who
would not have been content with the bareness that was to follow. Added
to that, the intense involvement of Char, des Forêts, and others in the
Resistance lends them a larger-than-life stature, as does the exile of vari-
ous writers from their native countries to France in this period, such as
that of Edmond Jabès from Egypt. The influence of Jabès is marked,
partly through the realization of his strong links with past French poetry
and poetics—no one in the twentieth century has been closer to Stéphane
Mallarmé than Jabès, whose work turns, as did Mallarmé’s, around the