Yves Bonnefoy and the “Genius” of Language

Along with poets such as Eugène Guillevic and Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy represents part of a wave of poets who contributed to reorienting post-World War II French poetry towards the everyday and the here and now, as opposed to the world of dreams and the marvelous glorified by Surrealism. For more than a half-century, Bonnefoy’s writings have constantly returned to that here and now, which he calls “Presence.” For Bonnefoy, poetry ought to open onto the epiphanic experience of Presence. Bonnefoy’s most famous work, Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, is an elegy dedicated to the perpetual demise and rebirth of a fictional being called Douve, herself emblematic of the perpetually fleeing here and now.