A prolific writer of both verse and prose and an important intellectual force in France for more than forty years, Pierre Emmanuel ranks among the leading poets of the mid twentieth century because of the variety of his inspiration, his skill in all types of versification (from fixed forms to the prose poem), and the sheer quantity of his poetic production. Emmanuel's understanding of the world and of the human condition is shaped, above all, by the Bible, and all of his poetry asserts that the stories of the Creation, the Fall, and the Redemption found in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament hold fundamental truths that alone can save a secularized, spiritually bereft generation from alienation and even social catastrophe. Far from imposing limits on his poetry, this Christian framework provided Emmanuel with a springboard to the exploration of myriad myths of the Western intellectual tradition...