This essay will be included as the preface to a volume of Bonnefoy’s essays, to be published by the University of Chicago Press at the end of this year.
The poetry and prose of Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923) have always possessed for me, ever since I first became acquainted with them and their author more than thirty years ago, a very rare quality—a quality that can only be characterized in words that run the risk, especially in English, of sounding ponderous and grandiloquent. But there is no help for it, and there are some subjects (this is, I believe, one of them) for which a certain elevation of tone is amply justified and even obligatory.
What first struck me about the man, aside from a complete absence of any pose or pretension, was a quiet and tranquil spiritual integrity, a determination—never asserted, but simply felt directly as part of the personality—to go his own way and to follow his own path. The nature of this path gradually became clearer to me as I immersed myself in his work, and began to acquire a sense of the deep wellsprings of inspiration from which it sprang. For I realized that Bonnefoy was writing poetry originating in a metaphysical impulse of the highest order—a poetry which, for someone like myself, whose native language is English, inevitably recalled some of the most soaring flights of the Wordsworthian muse. I do not know if the comparison has been made by others in
