SOURCE: LaCharité, Virginia A. “The Conflicts of Art: René Char's Placard pour un chemin des écoliers.” In Rewriting the Good Fight: Critical Essays on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War, edited by Frieda S. Brown, Malcolm Alan Compitello, Victor M. Howard, Robert A. Martin, pp. 185-97. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, LaCharité discusses the effects of war on the evolution of Char's early poetic development.

Poetry … goes forward in order to indicate the movable road.(1) 

The Spanish Civil War is the artistic and historical event that definitively marks the end of René Char's affiliation with Surrealism and the beginning of his adoption of a poetics of response. Char's identification with the events in Spain in 1936 and early 1937 is both personal and aesthetic. Among Char's close friends in the Surrealist group were the Spanish painters Picasso, Miró, and Dali,² and he had...