Jean Cocteau's role in twentieth-century French poetry is not unlike that of the rather too talkative Sphinx in his play, La Machine infernale (1934; translated as The Infernal Machine, 1936), who asks of Oedipus the well-known, oft-repeated riddle but then gives the answer away. On the one hand, were one to ask most people what kind of artist Cocteau was, a "poet" would not be the first thing to come to mind: celebrated works such as his play Orphée (Orpheus, 1927; translated, 1933) or his motion picture La Belle et la Bête, Journal d'un film (1946; released as Beauty and the Beast, 1948) have made Cocteau more familiar to most people as dramatist or cinéaste (film producer). On the other hand, "poet" is something of a given, since Cocteau always insisted he was nothing but a poet, calling whatever he did, in fact--and he did nearly everything--poetry: cinema...