Prose

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'. Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope, the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), regarded as France's greatest poet of the last fifty years, was the author of many volumes of poetry and poetic prose, and numerous books of essays on literature and art, including studies of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Goya and Giacometti. Between 1981 and 2016 he was Professor (and then Emeritus Professor) of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France, a position he inherited from Roland Barthes. His work has been translated into scores of languages and he himself was a master translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, Leopardi, Seferis and others. He received a wide variety of literary prizes. Stephen Romer is a poet and the translator of Bonnefoy's prose book L'Arrière-pays (1972/2012). He has served as Maître de conférences at the University of Tours since 1991. His anthology of twentieth-century French poems was published by Faber in 2002. His poetry collections include Tribute, Idols and Yellow Studio. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011. His latest collection, Set Thy Love in Order: New and Selected Poems, was published by Carcanet in 2017. He is Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford. John Naughton is Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University. He has authored or edited seven books in the area of modern French poetry, including The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (1984) and Shakespeare and the French Poet (2004). His translations have been honoured by the British Poetry Book Society and by the Modern Language Association. He has received the medal of the Collège de France in Paris for 'distinguished contributions to the study of French literature'. Anthony Rudolf is a poet and the translator of books of poetry from French, Russian and other languages. He was associated with Bonnefoy for more than half a century. He founded Menard Press in 1969, now dormant after nearly 50 years and 170 titles. He is Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2004), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2005) and Fellow of the English Association (2010). His collected poems, European Hours, was published by Carcanet in 2017.