Ecoles de Paris
The Penguin Book of French Verse. 4: The Twentieth Century. Edited by Anthony Hartley. (5s.) AN effect of foreshortening is common to all anthologies of contemporary verse. No leisurely perspectives, and little in the way of received opinion, are available to Mr. Hartley in presenting the work of thirty French poets of the present century, though he brings to the problem all the discrimination that one could hope for. If there are too many figures in the foreground of his picture, too much movement and too little order and repose, it is, after all, no fault of his—so many of these poets are alive, or at least their ideas, their manifestoes and convictions, are still real enough not to have dwindled into footnotes. Also, of course, it has to do with the unusual variety of their
doctrines, and the variety of experiments they have conducted in these fifty years.
Among thirty poets one might count almost as many schools and movements; and it is character- istic of them to take up extreme positions—more extreme, at least on the abstract plane, than any in contemporary English verse. In marked contrast to the rationalism of lye& philosophy or the accommodations of politics, there is scarcely a poet here but claims to use poetry as a means of chang- ing the world. Each school makes its uncom- promising edicts, and every few years there is a new revolution and more manifestoes, salons and barricades. It is hard at present to distinguish the poetry from the philosophy, the social attitudes, the undifferentiated intellectual ferment. Claudel, Paguy and Perse evoke different forms of primal, instinctive being; Valery 'speaks for the self- regarding consciousness. Guillaume Apollinaire is the first 'Cubist' poet, and begins the long romance with Surrealism which lasted longer and proved more fruitful in France than anywhere else. But Dada is to be distinguished from Surrealism; and beyond them Eluard and Aragon make the para- doxical leap into Communism. Vers libre come to fulfilment, poosie pure is awaited like a miraculous birth. And beside the seers and conscious theorists of poetry, there are many who make a more per- sonal claim : lingering poeles muudits, eccentrics with an innocent eye like Supervielle, sophisticated ehunsonnierslike Prevert and Queneau.
One cannot, then, simply take the poetry with- out acknowledging the metaphysical reveries and prises de position from which most of it springs. Mr. Hartley is a helpful guide: not only in a long introduction and through discreet and direct prose translations, but by choosing so many good poems among the merely representative. Probably these fifty years do not deserve a volume to themselves when as many as three centuries have gone to fill another volume in the series; but some dispropor- tion is in order if justice is done to the special character of the period. It may well remain an age more interesting for its experiments than for its achievement. And this foreshortened picture of it, with each life-size figure looming as large as the next, brings out just the quality of pure extravagance which makes experiment interesting in itself. The attenuation of Valery's consciousness seems here as much an acte gratuit, a result of loving experiment for its own sake, as the violent fantasy of Dada.
To an English ear, of course, these raids on the inarticulate may well have an unconvincing sound. Or rather, to the English mind; for to the ear the etfect is far happier than the doctrines seem to promise. The obscurity or strangeness in the conception of these poems is often resolved in the poetry itself. What emerges is poetry of a wonder- ful precision, exact in poise and gesture, and clearly related to older traditions of French litera- ture. This is most apparent in the profusion of lyrics of the Surrealist movement, but it holds not only for them. However experimental or revolu- tionary, these poets strike one as free to accept a great deal more of their past than their English contemporaries. They are not engaged on the hard task of remaking a tradition; the French language has remained an extraordinarily secure instrument in their hands, and they have an entire tradition at their disposal. Not only their immediate ancestors, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, are obvi- ously echoed here, but Hugo's alexandrine, all the Romantics, and La Fontaine, and the rhetoric of the seventeenth century. The poets range with a freedom which gives many pieces in this book a reminiscent charm or an air of elegant variation. It helps to compensate for the theoretical prob- lems with which the book bristles, and makes in itself for a good anthology. ROBERT TAUBMAN
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