In the post just previous I mentioned Yves Bonnefoy’s wonderful study Rimbaud, and while it’s far too concentrated to comment on in detail, I thought I’d offer a few quotes from it related to poetry in general:
Genius, at least where poetry is concerned, consists precisely in being faithful to freedom.
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It will suffice that words refuse to be concepts; that they keep themselves from serving; that they disappoint man’s propensity towards empirical observation in order to remain as much as possible in the light of the unnamed.
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What work of poetry […] has ever been undertaken in order to “communicate” a feeling, an understanding, or an idea? A poet’s task is to invent and to prove true; to live, I mean, and not to formulate—he will formulate only incidentally. His clarity, therefore, goes hand in hand with his enigmas. Explicit when he must be, in order to know himself, he will yet keep to himself what he already knows. But his greatness lies, precisely, in this questing solitude. His truth shines through all his dark approaches. And if the finished poem has any value for all men, it is because its author has desired simply to be a man, in a private experience.
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Modernity is the peasant’s grasp of a world untouched by miracles, of a difficult but healthy duality in the condition of man, misery and hope at the same time.
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[T]he latent presence of an idea is more creative than its formulation.
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A writer may quite easily yield to two opposed intuitions during the same period of time, projecting even before the intuited failure of one the intellectual foundations of the other, and consequently he may make side by side two simultaneous experiments in form….