Poetry and hope

In his early eighties the French poet Yves Bonnefoy started work on a book frequently known as the “writer’s tomb”: the Pléiade edition of his Œuvres poétiques, which has recently been published. The Pléiade signals a writer’s accession to the French panthéon of literary greats, but is normally planned and compiled after the writer’s death. Making all the key decisions about it, and relying on his editors for the annotations, Bonnefoy shaped the volume that would be the foremost record of his work and communicate the vision of poetry that he hoped would survive him.

Bonnefoy died in 2016. As a final dispatch appearing in the centenary year of his birth, his Œuvres poétiques sends a strikingly hopeful message. Bonnefoy was aware of how fractious and dangerous our world is, and how unevenly spread suffering is. He returned frequently in his writings to the waves of violence unleashed in the West across the twentieth century by the erosion of a common sense of the value of human life. He is also candid in accepting that poetry is now seen by many as irrelevant and archaic: “The sound has been cut”, he writes. And yet, as he prepared his Pléiade, he continued to affirm what he had said as far back as 1959: “I would like to reunite or even equate poetry and hope”.

At the centre of the Œuvres poétiques is the idea that poetry is a process of perceptual adjustment. The material that Bonnefoy includes, and the way that he organises it, reinforces the idea that poetry is not simply the art of composing verse, but a special way of seeing the world. Indeed, his Œuvres poétiques contains not only verse, but also prose poetry, some essays and some poetry translations. Almost all the texts appear in chronological order, breaking up the generic blocks imposed by previous editions and drawing attention to how his writing oscillates between different genres. In structuring his Pléiade like this, Bonnefoy insists that essay writing and translation, just as much as verse and prose poetry, can reflect on, experiment with and reattune our perception of existence.

Bonnefoy embraces the notion of the poet as vates, or seer. He argues that the special mode of seeing that poetry cultivates comes not from giving free rein to language – as the surrealists did – but from an awareness of how it structures our perception. His work explores how language abstracts and objectifies what we see, distancing us from the physical world and causing us to think about things in terms of their utility. A late essay, “Le Lieu d’herbes”, likens this process to an optical illusion: we live in an ever-shifting, material world, but our vision turns this scene into a series of static objects, a bare playing field for the pursuit of our desires. And it is because Bonnefoy believes that language distorts our view of the world in this way that he sees poetry in such curative or even redemptive terms. For him poetry is a way of treating the failures in our perception that prevent us from feeling our involvement in the physical world.

Bonnefoy made it his life’s work to communicate just how salutary is the fleeting realization of our immersion in a physical world. This is best demonstrated in his collection Dans le leurre du seuil, inspired by the poet’s relationship with Lucille Vines and their life at the old Cistercian abbey at Valsaintes in Provence, which they renovated together. The series of love poems at its centre presents love and sex as an experience of ecstasy, recalling the etymological root of ekstasis in Greek: “standing outside oneself”. They explore how the poet’s desire to take possession of his lover is quickly superseded by the endless addresses and appeals he makes to her. The dynamics of love are not something that he controls, but rather something that shapes him. He realizes that myriad, rhythmic acts of relation are what define us as lovers or as people in general. And so, unexpectedly, the sentimental European love lyric becomes the springboard for an exploration of worldly interconnection. For all their lofty ambition, though, these poems remain personal and intimately erotic: they suggest that the pulse of sex is so charged for us precisely because it makes us feel the creative force of contact, the way that our relations with others remake us in powerful ways.

Reading these love poems in the Pléiade we get a clearer sense of the context in which they were written. Daniel Lançon’s notes stress how important the renovation of the old abbey was to their creation. “It’s always only been a matter of Valsaintes”, Bonnefoy says in a letter. A reader can see how the poet’s interest in architecture combines with his interest in the physicality of the human voice and bodily acts of address to produce a vision of poetry as a form of theatre, as a space where different forces interact. In a similar way Lançon describes the huge box of drafts and notes, full of different kinds of voices, from which Dans le leurre du seuil emerged, and observes that the final text was always viewed as part of a vast “choral work” by the poet. He points to two very different kinds of material support – the house and the papers – from which the collection of poetry emerged. We are reminded that Dans le leurre du seuil explores the “choral” nature of all existence, and how any form of human expression, however refined, emerges from the co-operation of diverse parts.

The publication of the Pléiade shows such ideas in a new light. Up until the late 1990s Bonnefoy’s work was viewed as highly canonical but curiously idiosyncratic because of how it embraced the materiality of existence and distanced itself from the textual focus of the post-structuralist boom. Today, however, we might be more inclined to critique the theoretical avant-garde of that era for failing to perceive the prescience of his work. Crucial essays such as “L’Acte et le lieu de la poésie” or “La Parole poétique”, for example, anticipate recent developments in non-anthropocentric and new materialist thought. “La Parole poétique” argues that, because verse explores the interplay of sound and sense, it allows us to hear matter and meaning reverberating together, and reminds us that the intellect is just one force interacting with other forces. Bonnefoy suggests that this shift in our perception allows us, if only for a moment, to bypass the endless confrontations between human consciousness and matter, to bypass the linguistic mechanisms of distancing and objectification that breed violence and exploitation. The poem becomes not just a space of interaction, but an ecosystem. Bonnefoy never simply writes about the importance of interaction. He shows us how the act of writing can survive in a dangerous and destructive world – and help that world to survive – if it is prepared to understand the dynamics of its own emergence.

This is what Bonnefoy sought to communicate in one of his most significant poems, “L’Heure présente”, which was written towards the end of his life as he was planning his Pléiade. Reflecting on the legacy of poetry in general, the poem considers what it can hope to pass on to the next generation of readers and writers. It ends with these lines:

Heure présente, ne renonce pas,
Reprends tes mots des mains errantes de la foudre,
Écoute-les faire du rien parole,
Risque-toi
Dans même la confiance que rien ne prouve,

Lègue-nous de ne pas mourir désespérés.

Present hour, do not renounce,
Take back your words from the lightning’s errant hands,
Listen to them making of nothing speech,
Risk, risk,
Even the confidence that nothing can prove,

Will us not to die despairing.
(Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic)

These lines deliver a public address. They urge readers today not to give up on the creative power of poetry. They are also more personal, whispered out into the universe, urging the present moment of existence to keep renewing itself. However we read these lines, they propose that the unpredictability of the present moment offers important lessons in creativity, faith and hope. Yves Bonnefoy suggests that the way the lightning unfurls in the present makes us feel the unpredictable, atmospheric and resonant dynamics of its emergence. A singular gesture, it is an utterance that has no prior model or needs no authority to legitimize it. Bonnefoy urges us to be like lightning, to do the same as we speak, affirming the unpredictable generativity of our relationships with the world and with one another. Therein, he suggests, lies our hope. At the end of the poet’s life this thought allows him to face the instability of the present and the destruction of old age and death, and to keep despair at bay.

Emily McLaughlin is Associate Professor of French Studies at Wadham College, Oxford. She is the author of Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy: Ontological performance, 2020

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