SOURCE: Fowlie, Wallace. “Rene Char and the Poet's Vocation.” Yale French Studies, no. 21 (1958): 83-9.

In the following essay, Fowlie discusses Char's treatment in his poetry of the work and calling of the poet, an endeavor that comes with a disparaging price—“the daily assumption of peril.”

M. Char has never written in any of the usual ways about his understanding of the poet's vocation. But it becomes more and more clear, as his work continues to grow, and as the significance of this work continues to deepen, that the particular calling of the poet is his major theme. The poet's life unfolds within the limitations of man's mortal nature. Mortality and poetry are so conjugated in the writings of Char that one provides the setting for the other, that one is finally indistinguishable from the other. René Char has moved away from the esoteric place assigned to the...