Pierre Reverdy and the

"Poeme-Objet"
JULIA HUSSON

Toute la valeur d'une œuvre est dans la saveur singulière qu'elle

inaugure dans la réalité. C'est par là qu'elle prend place, au meilleur
rang, parmi les choses de la réalité. Ainsi, et comme par miracle, l'œuvre
faite devient une chose réelle, alors que les éléments dont elle est
constituée ne le sont pas.

Le livre de mon bord (p. 105).

In order to understand what the term "poème-objet" meant to Reverdy,

we need to see it in the context of that new movement with the seemingly
contradictory title of Literary Cubism. Far from being the product of a
literary school, this movement arose out of a close friendship and associa-
tion between the Cubist painters and their poet friends at the beginning
of the century. 1 The name was transferred, rather loosely, from the
former to the latter. I say loosely, because it is easily misinterpreted, even
by poets like Aragon who facetiously remarked: "Qu'est-ce qui peut bien
être cube dans les mots?" 2 We all know how inadequate the names of
literary movements can be, 3 but I prefer to see the justification for this
one in the analogy between Cubist painting and literature that Jean
Cassou pointed out: "Il [Reverdy] a pénétré la substance même de
l'opération cubiste; il a, avec une stricte rigueur, analysé l'esthétique

1
In his book, Juan Gris: His Life and Work (London, Lund Humphries, 1947),
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler gives an account of the life and aesthetic of a particular
Cubist painter who was one of Reverdy's closest friends. It is interesting to see
just how clearly Reverdy did understand, and how closely he shared, the ideals
and aims of this painter.
2
L. Aragon, Chroniques du Bel Canto, Genève, Skira, 1947, p. 22.
3
And, for that matter, movements in painting. The very title Cubism was the
result of a superficial first impression, and emphasises just one detail of the Cubist
technique, that is, the reduction of forms to their essential geometrical shapes.
The term is already misleading in reference to painting, but is even less applicable
to poetry, and this, no doubt, explains why some literary critics dismiss the
movement as being impossible.
21
 PIERRE REVERDY AND THE "POEME-OBJET*
cubiste dans ses textes théoriques et l'a appliquée dans ses poèmes.
Ceux-ci sont les exacts analogues des toiles de ses amis, ce sont des objets
de même nature." 4
The ideal shared by the Cubist painters and poets alike was primarily
to give art its own reality, to free it from its traditional subservience to
the real world, which it was supposed to imitate. "Il ne faut pas que l'art
soit comme un parasite de la réalité." 5 Their aim was to create a work of
art which would exist as an object, that is, an autonomous creation which
could take its place among the natural things of the world and no longer
exist as a reflection of that reality. This was what struck Reverdy so much
about the work of his friend Braque. He tells of how, when he met
Braque one day in the fields and saw his painting lying on the ground,
he remarked: "C'est étonnant ce que ça tient contre la couleur réelle et
les pierres." 6 The poets who most clearly formulated this new aesthetic
were Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob. Their aims are not to be confused
with the rather naïve attempts of certain poets at the time to create poetic
"objects" by writing poems on cubes or folding paper to be suspended
from the ceiling in a room 7 or even with Apollinaire's use of original
typography in his Calligrammes. Such devices in no way changed the
poem itself and seem to be equivalent to those of painters who thought
that to reduce everything to geometrical shapes in a picture was to be a
Cubist. There is something more fundamental in common between the
true Cubist painters and poets: the need they felt for a more solid
architecture which would be its own justification and not just a support
for a subject or "story", and a return to the object as a reaction against,
on one hand, the formlessness and fleeting character of Impressionism
and, on the other, the equally fleeting and rarefied atmosphere of
Symbolism. Of course, the way had already been paved by the Post-
Impressionists and by poets like Rimbaud, but Reverdy and Jacob
wanted to carry this still further — to eliminate narrative from their works
altogether and to fix the reader's attention on the poem itself as a con-
crete, compact whole. Max Jacob's criticism of Rimbaud explains this in
a striking image:

Le poème est un objet construit et non la devanture d'un bijoutier.

4
Jean Cassou, "Reverdy, poète cubiste," in Hommage à Pierre Reverdy, Rodez,
Entretiens sur les Lettres et les Arts, 1961, p. 63.
5
P. Reverdy, Le Gant de crin, Paris, Pion, 1926, p. 29.
6
P. Reverdy, "Georges Braque: une aventure méthodique", in Mercure de France,
July 1963, p. 380.
T Examples of these and other attempts to create "poetic objects" are mentioned
by Alain Bosquet in his book Verbe et Vertige, Paris, Hachette, 1961.
22
JULIA HUSSON
Rimbaud, c'est la devanture du bijoutier, ce n'est pas le bijou: le poème
en prose est un bijou.8

There was still a certain looseness that had to be eliminated — the

brilliance of parts detracting from the architecture of the whole. In
Reverdy's case also we feel a certain nostalgia for a more plastic medium,
a certain envy of his painter friends but at the same time the feeling that
he was born a poet and is already committed — he must make do with
the tools he has:

Je sais à présent pourquoi j'aurai passé toute ma vie

à regretter de n'avoir pas exercé l'art de peindre.
Je sais par quoi il est plus lié à la réalité que
l'écriture: c'est qu'avec les mots bleu ou rouge on
ne risque pas de se tacher les doigts.9

There is a definite down-to-earth, workmanlike approach in his attitude

to poetry, and most of the images he uses to talk about poetry reflect it:
"Le poète est maçon, il ajuste des pierres." 10 "Le poète juxtapose et
rive." 11 "La page attend la plume comme la toile le pinceau." 12 At the
same time the Cubist poets were conscious of redefining poetry and of
giving it a new character that would once and for all set it apart from
prose. 13 Poetry, they thought, is language, but language used in a differ-
ent way, to a different end, which is not just utilitarian. Poetry does not
come from the use of ready-made verse forms, nor is it inherent in any
particular object or scene. As Max Jacob said, it is not enough to write a
series of unequal lines with a half-pun at the end and think it is poetry.
"Poetry comes from poets", says Reverdy, in a disarmingly simple
formula. A poet alone is capable of using language in a different way, to
a different end, from the prose writer. In a poem every word must seem
necessary, immovable, irreplaceable. The poet welds words together into
a single indivisible creation from which nothing can be taken away
without destroying the poem.
This is where the greatest challenge lay to the Cubist poet — to use
words in a different way, words which already had a meaning before he
8
Max Jacob, Le Comet à dés (Préface de 1916), Paris, Stock, 1923, p. 16.
9
P. Reverdy, En Vrac, Monaco, Editions du Rocher, 1956, p. 167.
10
P. Reverdy, Le Livre de mon bord, Paris, Mercure de France, 1948, p. 91.
"Ibid., p. 132.
!2 Ibid., p. 78.
13
1 do not want to suggest that they were entirely original; in fact a poet as
different as Valéry expressed many similar views quite independently.
23
 PIERRE REVERDY AND THE "POEME-OBJET"
used them. Their purpose had always been to convey a meaning, to
express an idea, or to tell a story. Now the poet's task was to remove the
narrative from a poem without the words becoming meaningless.14 Here
the technique of the painters came to his aid — he replaced succession by
juxtaposition, progression by simultaneity. The ideal of the "poème-objet"
is static art, a poem in which the most important element is the architec-
ture, the structure. This does not mean traditional verse forms which,
indeed, Reverdy rejected. The subject alone, he said, determines the
form of the poem: "C'est cette substance [poétique] qui lui impose la
seule forme qui lui soit nécessaire."15 We shall now examine the tech-
niques used by Reverdy to make his "poème-objet" "avec ces mots . . .
qui sont à tout le monde", 16 to put into practice the Cubist ideal, and
create a poem which tells no story and proves no point and yet which
moves us with mysterious force beyond our intellectual comprehension.
By way of illustration I have chosen the collection of poems entitled Les
Ardoises du toit, because of the time at which they were written ( 1918 )
and because they seem to crystallise the various Cubist aspects of a
technique which was modified later. 17 The title itself is significant. As the
introductory poem tells us, each poem is written on a slate, therefore is
already seen as an object:

Sur chaque ardoise

qui glissait du toit
on
avait écrit
un poème

The visual aspect, we shall see, is as important as the aural one. Even the
diagonal lay-out in this poem recalls the slope of the roof. This kind of
pictorial quality had already appeared in another collection of Reverdy 's
poems, La Lucarne ovale, published two years earlier. There we are
reminded of the oval frame of many Cubist still-lifes, for the window
14
For Reverdy the "meaning" of the poem would be the creation of a particular
"emotion", not the expression of an idea.
15
Reverdy, Le Gant de crin, op. cit., p. 17.
16
P. Reverdy, "Cette émotion appelée poésie", in Mercure de France, août 1950,
p. 582.
17
Suzanne Bernard has already made an excellent study of the Cubist prose poem
in her book Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu'à nos jours, Paris, Nizet, 1959.
This was probably even a greater challenge to the poet. I think myself that there
is a greater affinity between the verse poems here and painting because of the
freedom given to the poet in his choice of lay-out. The visual aspect, the "shape"
of the verse poem, adds yet another dimension which the prose poem did not give.

24
JULIA HUSSON

constitutes an ever-present frame through which the poet looks at the

world.
In order to create a new reality one must first break down the old
order and then recompose it in an entirely new way. Juan Gris spoke of
a pack of cards reshuffled incessantly into new combinations but with the
emphasis on the limited initial elements. For Reverdy, similarly:

Le poète est un kaléidoscope. Il entre peu de choses dans l'infinie

diversité de ses combinaisons.18

The elements used by Reverdy are few, but because they are familiar
and elementary — la maison, la cheminée, la porte, la lampe, le vent —
they are powerful. The poet is not looking for unusual elements but a
new, original order.

Il ne s'agit plus, c'est aujourd'hui un fait acquis, d'émouvoir par l'exposé

plus ou moins pathétique d'un fait divers, mais aussi largement, aussi
purement que le peuvent faire, le soir, un ciel tout crépitant d'étoiles,
la mer calme, grandiose, tragique, ou un grand drame muet joué par
les nuages sous le soleil.19

So, in the first stage of the Cubist process of creation we have the break-
ing down of reality into separate elements. In writing this means dis-
continuity, the suppression of logical links between sentences and words,
an apparently indiscriminate use of tenses which makes actions seem to
happen simultaneously or at some undefined time, the absence of punc-
tuation making each line self-sufficient, the new typography which sets
words on a page like so many islands, isolating some, grouping others in
a dense mass or in a pattern, or leaving blanks within the body of the
poem itself. Each one of these techniques seems designed to separate the
elements of the poem and to make any kind of narrative interpretation
impossible. The greatest danger to the poet would seem at this point to
be fragmentation.
It is here that we must look at the second stage — the synthesis or
riveting together (since this is the term that Reverdy favours) of these
elements in such a way that they become inseparable, one single fabric. 20
Qu'on l'ait sous les yeux ou devant la mémoire, l'œuvre ne doit jamais
18
Le Livre de mon bord, Paris, Mercure, 1948, p. 73.
19
Le Gant de crin, op. cit., p. 41.
20
1 think the painter Juan Gris best defined the Cubist idea of architecture in a
work of art when he compared it to a new chemical formula as opposed to a
simple mixture of ingredients — in Juan Gris: his life and work, op. cit.
25
 PIERRE REVERDY AND THE "POEME-OBJET'
se présenter que comme un ensemble qu'on ne peut dessouder.21
The first step towards giving each poem an individual character, an
identity as an object, was the new typography. Reverdy set out his poem
on the blank page as a painter might a picture, with a feeling for the
masses of words almost as concrete elements. The poem is no longer a
dense mass of lines of similar lengths divided or not into equal stanzas.
Each poem has its own particular "shape." The lines often start half-way
in from the margin, or sometimes a simple word may be isolated in the
middle of the page or on the right-hand side. The poems, all except one,
are never long enough to take up more than one page and thus the whole
poem may be seen at one glance in its entirety, from beginning to end,
with its own characteristic form. Because there is no need to turn the
page the reader's attention is fixed on the poem by its initial visual
impact. Neither in Cubist painting or poetry should we need to search
outside the work of art:
Le public demande à une œuvre d'art de la transporter ailleurs. Or,
cet art [le cubisme] prétend fixer l'esprit du lecteur ou du spectateur sur
l'œuvre comme par une épingle.22
Reverdy makes use of blanks in his poems both to replace punctuation
and to make the reading of the poem easier. His blanks are never just
empty spaces. They mark divisions in the train of the poet's thoughts and
feelings, and they are as necessary as the silences in music to the over-all
rhythm of the poem in that they are filled, as much as the words them-
selves, with silent beats. A simple detached word is read much more
slowly and often takes as long as a whole line. This means that the word
is given a double emphasis — by its length and by its visual effect. A
Reverdy poem is never just abstract music — it must be seen as well as
heard. Each word has the figurative appearance of a concrete thing.
Sometimes the poem achieves an effect reminiscent of Apollinaire's
Calligrammes where the disposition of the words makes in fact a "pic-
ture" of the thing they are describing, as in the poem Orage in which the
diagonal pattern of the lines evokes the lightning itself:

Et c'est tout
Soi
Sous le ciel ouvert
Fendu
Un éclat où le souffle est resté
Suspendu

21 Self-Defense, Paris, l'Imprimerie Littéraire, 1919 (no page numbers).

22 £,e Gant de crin, op. cit., p. 25.
26
JULIA HUSSON
or in the poem Bêtes where the assymetrical balancing of the lines sug-
gests the pacing back and forth of the animal in its cage:
Tu regardes en passant l'animal enchaîné
Il part de son élan
L'exil entre les haies
or the drops of water hanging from the spout so vividly evoked by the
indented line:

Trois gouttes d'eau pendent à

la gouttière

On some occasions the whole poem is written around a central blank or

space as in En Face, or seems to be filled with air because its subject is of
the same nature, in poems such as Air, Soleil, Matinée.
As can be seen from these examples, Reverdy's effects are always
discreet and are never arbitrary, never used for their own sake, to stand
out in a poem at the expense of the rest. This kind of calculated virtuosity
is scorned by Reverdy:

Il n'y a que la pureté des moyens qui donne la pureté des œuvres.
L'image pour l'image est détestable.23

The typography is always dictated by the meaning of the poem; it is a

structural element, not mere decoration. True to the Cubist aesthetic the
detail is always subordinated to the whole, to the "architecture" of the
work. This is particularly true of Reverdy's images, which, in spite of
their surprising novelty, are absorbed into the fabric of the poem and
have a convincing naturalness; in fact we almost pass over them some-
times for they are enunciated with such simplicity that we accept them
unquestioningly :

La gouttière est bordée de diamants

Les oiseaux les boivent.24

Ta main sortait sous la manche du soir.25

Reverdy's theory of the image has so influenced the poetry of this

century that we tend to forget how he first formulated it:
23 Ibid., p . 35.
24
Les Ardoises du toit, in Plupart du Temps, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p . 149.
25
Ibid., p . 166, "Une éclaircie."

27
 PIERRE REVERDY AND THE "POEME-OBJET'
L'image est une création pure de l'esprit. Elle ne peut naître d'une
comparaison, mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins
éloignées. Plus les rapports des deux réalités rapprochées seront
lointaines et justes, plus l'image sera forte, plus elle aura de puissance
émotive et de réalité poétique.26

The "comme" of comparisons had already been eliminated by poets

before him, but Reverdy carried the process further still by his idea of the
image being that which welds together seemingly disparate elements
with a shock that reveals a new reality. He at once realised the added
importance of the image as a structural element through its power of
synthesis. It was for his theory of the image that the Surrealists recog-
nised Reverdy as their master, yet they misunderstood its true meaning.
They overestimated the shock value of the image, creating arbitrary
combinations for their own sake, with no intellectual control over the
new reality which these combinations revealed. They did not take into
account the second half of Reverdy's theory:

Deux réalités sans rapport ne se rapprochent pas. Elles s'opposent, d'où

parfois une surprise momentanée qui peut être séduisante, mais n'est
pas une image formée.27

Reverdy's images neither describe nor compare, but present us with

the new reality as he has created it, and we accept it as a new truth, as
we saw in the two images quoted above. In some cases he brings together
two separate realities and we ourselves supply the link in our reading —
each new line gives meaning to the preceding one or enriches it. Thus
the image:

Un livre a fermé ses portes

is further enlarged by the following line:

La prison des pensées où la mienne était morte.28

Reverdy insists that his words are not symbols — they are themselves,
concrete objects that we all know, and it is their juxtaposition with others
that gives them new meaning.
26
Le Gant de crin, op. cit., p. 32.
"Ibid., p. 33.
28
Les Ardoises du toit, p. 209, "Visite."
28
JULIA HUSSON
The suppression of logical links creates an initial surprise, yet we have
no difficulty in understanding:
Deux bouches qui ne se voient pas
"Couloir"29
La lampe est un coeur qui se vide
"Tard dans la nuit"30
or
L'argent coule le long des arbres
Ta figure est un bloc de marbre
"Sombre"31

where the effect of moonlight is seen although it is not mentioned directly.

We have seen how the image can unite separate elements at one point
in a poem. But images are also used on a larger scale to give unity to the
poem as a whole through the repetition of certain themes and words
which create echos and recalls.
In "Etape" we are ever conscious of the starry night above a dying
man, revolving about his head, through the careful placing at intervals
during the poem of images, not descriptions:

Les étoiles le fusillaient

Dans l'univers refait qui tourne devant toi

Sous les larmes du firmament32

The same procedure is used in the poem "Aile", where the image of the
bird-soul becomes clear only at the end, when we ourselves have linked
the first mention of wings:
Les ailes noires se balancent
with the last:
Et l'oiseau sans forme est parti
L'Ame aux ailes trop courtes
On a détruit le nid33
although the poet himself has not connected them for us.
29
Les Ardoises du Toit, op. cit., p. 208.
so Ibid., p. 160.
81 Ibid., p. 198.
32
Ibid., p. 220.
33
Ibid., p. 192.

29
 PIERRE REVERDY AND THE "POEME-OBJET'
At times we can follow the elaboration of two separate sets of images
which remain nearly always opposed to each other throughout the poem.
The group light/noise/heat is often opposed to darkness/silence/cold,
and in the poems "Patience" and "Visite" we find similar contrasts
between weight and weightlessness and the movements of ascension and
descent.
A further step in the interpénétration of words and images is a simul-
taneous presentation of two separate sets of images, one concrete and the
other abstract or imaginary. Thus in the poem "Tête" we see at the same
moment a head and a house and cannot separate them since the
attributes of one are given to the other by the poet's imagination. Some-
times a whole poem is written in this way, sometimes the combination of
concrete and imaginary is restricted to one "impossible" image:

La haie du rêve noir

or:
Les étoiles le fusillaient34
"Etape"
or:
Sur le trottoir mouillé glissent
Tous leurs désirs éparpillés35
"Projets"
Nature is quite often given human characteristitcs, an independence and
will of its own; inanimate objects move of their own accord:

Le talus grimpe sur la rive

"Etape"
Le ciel plisse son front
Prépare une tempête
Les autres sont là pour la fête
Et les astres tendent des fils
De maison à maison
"Projets"

This technique of simultaneous description does in fact create a static

poem. Yet though there is no linear development there is movement of a
purely internal kind. Reverdy is always conscious of an invisible frame-
work outside of which the poem never extends—it never opens on to any-
34 Ibid., p . 220.
35 Ibid., p . 218.

30
JULIA HUSSON
thing else. In fact, the most characteristic movement of any Reverdy poem
is a reversal in the last half or quarter of the poem, or even in the last line.
The last half counteracts the first. For instance, if there had been a move-
ment of hope in the first half, the second will destroy it; the poem turns
back on itself towards the centre, which seems to represent an immobile
point or axis. The last line nearly always seems to close a circle with the
finality of the frame of a painting, which reminds us that Cubist paintings
always led the eye back into the picture, never outside of it, as the use of
linear perspective and cut-off objects did in traditional paintings. Often
this last line seems to sum up what has gone before, as in the poems
"Fausse porte ou portrait", "Sombre", "Clartés terrestres"; it is a definition
of what we have by this time pieced together and understood from the
reading of the poem — reminiscent of the solution of a puzzle.
Often there is no verb, just a noun or phrase:

Une glace
Une pluie d'étoiles
Un éclair d'électricité

and the movement circles back to the beginning again.

The remaining great unifying factor in Reverdy's poems is the rhythm,
which we mentioned briefly in reference to the typography. Although
there are never any definite patterns of verse and rhyme, Reverdy often
uses traditional verse forms, alexandrines and especially octosyllables;
but these are always interspersed with lines of two, three and four
syllables or more, which not only give emphasis to the words that com-
pose them, but mark divisions in the text. Often a line seems astride two
lines, looking backwards and forwards and giving meaning to both:

La fenêtre déverse un carré bleu

La porte est plus intime
Une séparation
Le remords et le crime
"Tard dans la nuit"
Dans le ciel qui fait mille plis
L'air bleu
Une étoffe irréelle
C'est peut-être une autre dentelle
A la fenêtre
"Matinée"
31
 PIERRE REVERDY AND THE "POEME-OBJET"

A common rhythm is the balancing back and forth of lines — both to the
eye and to the ear — one half answering the other, like the swing of a
pendulum:

Le cri venait de loin

Par derrière la nuit
Et tout ce qui s'avance
Et tout ce que je fuis
"Une Eclaircie"

Here, a feeling of panic is created, and yet the same asymmetrical pattern
can sound completely different in a poem like "Son de cloche" with its
longer lines slowing the movement down. Here it is the silences that
make themselves felt:
Regarde
Les étoiles ont cessé de briller
La terre ne tourne plus
Une tête s'est inclinée
Les cheveux balayant la nuit
Again in the poem "Bêtes", as we showed earlier, the rhythm is an
exact echo of the action — first the pacing back and forth of the animal in
its cage, then, as it looks towards the sky and freedom, the poem opens
out on to one word which seems infinite:
Son œil sonde le ciel d'un regard étonné
La tête contre la barrière
Vers ce reflet de l'infini
L'immensité

The rhythm carried over through the blanks assures the continuity of the
poem and so avoids any effect of fragmentation.
It might seem from this preoccupation with form that the resulting
poems would have an impersonal, almost abstract character, and in fact
some critics have reproached Reverdy with a certain monotony in his
limited elements and a too great austerity or bareness. In defence of the
poet and in conclusion I come to the last and no doubt more important
element in Reverdy's poetic theory — the subject-matter, as he under-
stands it:
Le propre du poète c'est de ne connaître et et de n'avoir à sa disposition
qu'un seul sujet, lui-même36
36
Le Gant de crin, op. cit., p. 59.
32
JULIA HUSSON

The greatest unifying factor in all Reverdy's poems is in fact the con-
stant presence of the poet, the unity of feeling and personality which
pervades them all. Poetry serves the double purpose of revealing the poet
to himself — that part of himself which is the most obscure, the most
secret and rare — and of conveying it to the reader. And these poems,
these never-ending variations on a few limited themes, are in search of
that essence:

La fin de l'art n'est pas l'art, cela ne veut rien dire — elle est d'émouvoir.
Mais émouvoir en tant qu'art, par l'œuvre.37

For, paradoxically, it is not the subject-matter alone which can move us,
but the finished work of art. It is the transformation of raw emotion
through the use of language that puts it on a higher plane, one on which
it is more capable of moving us. The actual form is but the most perfect
extériorisation of what the poet feels most deeply. What we see on paper
are merely the means he has used to achieve his higher purpose, that
mysterious "soudure d'âme à âme dans le choc poésie."38
The all-important form, paradoxically, must pass unnoticed, since it has
become the only possible vehicle to express the subject:

Le style, c'est la forme de la pensée exprimée et non pas la forme de

la phrase.39

The two — form and subject-matter — are so inextricably linked that

one cannot exist without the other. I think this is best explained by
Reverdy's image of the arrow:

Ce n'est pas la matière dont la flèche est faite qui la fait voler —
qu'importe le bois ou l'acier, mais sa forme, la façon dont elle est taillée
et équilibrée qui font qu'elle va au but et pénètre, et, bien entendu
aussi, la force et l'adresse de l'archer.40

What happens between the poet and the reader when the poem is read
is something beyond rational explanation, described by Reverdy in terms
of miracle and magic — "le mystère." But, contrary to the common ideas
of inspiration and originality, Reverdy believes that only the most
familiar, the most general and most simple things can have a truly
37 En Vrac, op. cit., p. 189.
38 "Cette émotion appelée poésie", art. cit., p. 587.
3» Le Gant de crin, p. 71.
40
"Cette émotion appelée poésie", art. cit., p. 590.
33
 PIERRE REVERDY AND THE "POEME-ORJET"
powerful and eternal impact. What he calls "le réel" is really what the
Cubist painters wished to attain by rejecting the superficial and reducing
objects to their permanent, essential nature:

Parmi tous les phénomènes sensibles le poète choisit ceux qui participent
strictement du réel. Il faut entendre par là toutes choses simples,
profondes, constantes que le temps n'apporte ni n'emporte . . . (le
nuage et la table sont, comme le soleil, la pluie et l'arbre, des réalités;
la forme particulière d'un vêtement est irréelle . . . 41

As I pointed out earlier, the words are not used as symbols but as
themselves, as signs, concentrating within them everything we know
about the object they stand for; and the more familiar the object, the
greater resonance in the word:

Le mot a plus de force que le réel qu'il signifie, parce qu'il évoque d'un
coup à l'esprit, la multitude et la variété dans la forme que l'expérience
lui a donnée de la chose signifiée; table devient toutes les tables . . . etc.
Le réel limite, le mot illimite.42

What some critics regard as "poverty" is instead extreme concentration

and achieves an extraordinary density of expression — "le faisceau
d'émotions" which Reverdy refers to in Le Gant de crin.'13 Not a word is
superfluous: "le décoratif c'est le contraire du réel."44 The lack of adjec-
tives, the naming of objects with the definite article, the constant use of
vague pronouns (quelqu'un, on), or the vague use of normally definite
ones (il, tu, vous,) give a deliberate lack of precision, but at the same time
a universal, eternal quality which time cannot change. The poet's
relationship with his reader will be never-endingly new and immediate
since it is not limited to any precise historical time or situation; it is that
mysterious spark which unites two human beings and is beyond their
comprehension:

L'émotion mystérieuse qui agite le lecteur d'une œuvre sans qu'il sache
pourquoi ni comment est la plus haute émotion que l'on ait jamais pu
atteindre en art, et la plus pure.45
University of Melbourne
41
Le Gant de crin, op. cit., p. 52.
4
%En Vrac, op. cit., p. 37.
43
Le Gant de crin, p. 46.
44
Ibid., p. 57.
48
Le Gant de crin, op. cit., p. 30.
34