SOURCE: St. Aubyn, F. C. “Yves Bonnefoy: First Existentialist Poet.” Chicago Review 17, no. 1 (1964): 118-29.

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, in addition to an earlier work he has subsequently preferred to forget, three volumes of poetry, a book on French gothic art, a critical biography of Rimbaud, two volumes of essays, and translations of at least three of Shakespeare's plays. His first significant volume of poetry appeared when Bonnefoy was thirty. His development would thus seem to have been a slow maturation which burst into full and prolific bloom. His poetry is serious, not to say somber, and evidences the obscurity and hermeticism of much of recent French literature. The study of Bonnefoy's poetry has been facilitated, however, by the publication of the two volumes of his essays, above all...