[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, between "le vrai lieu" and "le désert." No writer of our time has expressed this theme in more impressive and convincing accents than Yves Bonnefoy. And it is because he refuses, like Dostoevsky, to surrender either pole of the terrible antinomy—because he feels each with equal purity and equal strength—that his work is so powerful and (I use the word advisedly) so exhilarating. For it is only by being able to endure, as Hegel would say, the full power of the negative, that whatever positive emerges—tentative and minimal as it must inevitably be in our own time—maintains its ability to console and to persuade. (pp. 400-01)

It seems to me that students of Yves Bonnefoy would be well...