After World War II…the mature poetry of René Char came as a revelation.
René Char (1907–1988) was a French poet. After the publication of a book of his poems, he moved to Paris and joined the surrealists, along with Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel. In 1940, he joined the French Resistance under the name Captain Alexandre, an experience he wrote about in the prose poems Feuillets d’Hypnos. He died of a heart attack in 1988.
René Char (1907-88) is acknowledged as one of the greatest French poets of all time. His work speaks in tones both universal and grounded in his native Provence, where during World War II he commanded the Resistance maquis. Originally allied with the Surrealists, his poems afterward evolved from the “fury and mystery” of the war period to his later existential and metaphysical reflections. His poems are violent and tender, passionate and cool, massive and of small scope-at once local and cosmic. The Selected Poems of René Char is a comprehensive, bilingual overview reflecting the poet’s wide stylistic and philosophical range, from aphorism to dramatic lyricism. In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugene Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.
After World War II…the mature poetry of René Char came as a revelation.
