Poet, translator, and respected critic of both literature and art, Yves Bonnefoy is widely acknowledged as the most significant and influential figure in contemporary French poetry. He has held visiti...
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Critical Essay by Sarah Lawall
Yves Bonnefoy's poetry incorporates the risk of silence. Not silence itself, for unlike Rimbaud he continues to write, but a systematic disbelief in the efficacy ...
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Critical Essay by Mary Ann Caws
Bonnefoy's visionary place of poetry is a "vrai lieu," sacrificial and yet empty of shadow, an orangery closed off where the vacant self is determi...
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Critical Essay by Sarah N. Lawall
Place is a key concept in the work of Yves Bonnefoy. The "true place" is real yet ideal, specific yet transfigured, embedded in the world yet overflowin...
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Critical Essay by Marc Hofstadter
Death is an almost overwhelming reality in Yves Bonnefoy's poetry. In his vision of things, death undermines all happiness and all permanence. Not something we...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Frank
[The obsessive and dominating theme of Yves Bonnefoy's writings is] the conflict between faith and reason, hope and despair, life and death, light and darkness, b...
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Critical Essay by Richard Stamelman
[Yves Bonnefoy's] is a poetry that refuses to close its eyes to those experiences of loss that identify temporal existence. Death, absence, nothingness, ruin...
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In the following essay, St. Aubyn discusses “similarities between Bonnefoy's approach to poetry and the existentialist approach to being.”
Since 1953 Yves Bonnefoy has published, ...
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In the following essay, Caws maintains that Bonnefoy's moral concerns help to sustain his long poems.
Often, a general question apparently about form is not that only: it aims at something spec...
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In the following essay, Grosholz finds allusions to Bonnefoy's Valsaintes country home in his verse.
The shadow of an old house falls across the poems in Yves Bonnefoy's Pierre éc...
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In the following essay, Kargiotis analyzes the various modalities and functions of death in On the Motion and Immobility of Douve.
“L'esprit […],” says Yves Bonnefoy in &#x...
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In the following review, Mus provides a stylistic analysis of Dans le leurre du seuil, asserting that Bonnefoy's verse is grandiloquent and difficult for English-speaking readers.
“Je ve...
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In the following essay, Hofstadter examines “experiences of transcendence” in “Un feu va devant nous,” the third section of Pierre écrite.
Death is an almost overwhe...
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In the following essay, Caws explores the major themes and images of On the Motion and Immobility of Douve and Hier régnant désert.
L'Anti-Platon (The Anti-Plato [abbreviated AP])...
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In the following essay, Argyros considers the complex relationship between critical interpretations of Bonnefoy's verse, his own theoretical writings, and his long poem, On the Motion and Immob...
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In the following essay, Stamelman explores the dimensions of “Bonnefoy's subversion of representation in his poetry and writings on art.”
“C'est simple,” Yves...
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In the following essay, Naughton considers the notion of presence as a unifying element of Bonnefoy's poetry as well as a recurring topic of critical discussion.
The notion of presence is a com...
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In the following essay, Lawler underscores the search for truth in the poetry of Début et fin de la neige.
Can poetry aspire to a kind of truth? Is it possible, two hundred years after Goethe, ...
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In the following essay, McAllister contends that Bonnefoy favors metonymy over metaphor in his verse.
Yves Bonnefoy's conception of writing as un-writing (désécriture) fosters poe...
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Yves Bonnefoy
