Aimer ouvrir l’amande de l’absence dans la parole »: Language, Poetry and the Search of Meaning in Yves Bonnefoy’s Work

Abstract

The reflections developed by Yves Bonnefoy in his writings on poetry reveal the convictions of the poet, who proposes a philosophy of poetry. The poetic language and the expressive capacity of words are systematically questioned by the poet, who is preoccupied with the role of the poetry in its relation to the essence of being and to the world. Considering that the system of language signs is extremely fixed, Bonnefoy states the necessity of making a “tear in the network of representations” in order to rediscover the real relation between the world and language, assigning poetry the task of reappropriating meaning and of recovering the lost unity. This paper explores the complementarity of Bonnefoy’s theoretical thinking and poetic work, in an attempt to show the emergence of the poet’s theories and how they materialize in his work, thus shedding light on the correspondence between his theory and his poetry.