SOURCE: Lawler, James. “‘La neige piétinée est la seule rose’: Poetry and Truth in Yves Bonnefoy.” L'Esprit Créateur 32, no. 2 (summer 1992): 43-54.

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, to think of a convergence? Do we not know that the gods have disappeared, that the myths have small virtue, that language is deceptive? Char calls poetry and truth “synonymous,” but his vision is as unarguable as the Sorgue. On the other hand, Yves Bonnefoy, from as early as his Traité du pianiste (1946), plies the status of poetry with searching questions. He recognizes that he had to break his allegiance to Surrealism, for the Surrealists erred in confusing dream with illumination. Yet they were right in their...