SOURCE: Caws, Mary Ann. “Yves Bonnefoy, Sostenuto: On Sustaining the Long Poem.” L'Esprit Créateur 36, no. 3 (fall 1996): 84-93.

In the following essay, Caws maintains that Bonnefoy's moral concerns help to sustain his long poems.

Often, a general question apparently about form is not that only: it aims at something specific, and goes beyond form. The one I want to ask now, both generally and in a specific meditation on the work of Yves Bonnefoy—concerns the long poem, and so implies connectedness and interruption. In so doing, it concerns more than that: I take it as a question not only aesthetic, but moral.

What is it, then, that sustains the long poem? What kinds of joinings enable its articulation? What gives it breath? Whatever response we could give, which of course, as in all such cases, is individual and comes from our own perception, background, and judgement, may...