SOURCE: Aspel, Paulène. “The Poetry of Rene Char, or Man Reconciled [1968].” World Literature Today 63, no. 2 (spring 1989): 205-08.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1968, Aspel comments on Char's career as a poet, observing how the poet uses certain symbols to portray the “opposite, ambiguous human behaviors.”

At the age of sixty, with twenty volumes of poetry published, René Char is considered by more and more critics in France as the greatest living French poet. Albert Camus had made such a claim for him as early as 1951, in L'homme révolté, when he greeted him as “poète de notre renaissance,” and in the preface he wrote for Char's Dichtungen, an anthology compiled in Germany in 1959, he declared that no such voice had been heard since the pre-Socratics. In 1962 Char was placed among the constellations whose “feux sont sûrs et durables,” and in 1966 he was...