Patrice de la Tour du Pin: 'La Quête de joie' au cœur d''Une somme de poésie' — Actes du colloque au Collège de France, 25–26 septembre 2003 (review)

Twenty years after the first international conference on La Tour du Pin, the proceedings of which were published by Nizet in 1983, this collection of twelve essays boasts a short foreword by Yves Bonnefoy, who reveals the lasting impression the poet made on him at the beginning of his own writing career. The editor, president of the Société des Amis de Patrice de la Tour du Pin, has assembled an admirably coherent group of texts which, while exploring a wide range of themes, complement each other well. One recurrent theme is that of influence and intertext. The volume begins with an examination of the fifteen-year correspondence between La Tour du Pin and Anne-Henri de Biéville, highlighting the importance of their friendship to the elaboration of Une somme de Poésie. Elsewhere, a discussion of L'Enfer brings to light numerous references to nineteenth-century poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, while an essay on the English poet Stephen Spender, author of the preface to the English edition of La Vie récluse en poésie, reveals the importance of English language poets such as Poe, Whitman and Keats to La Tour du Pin. The Christian dimension of his poetry is also explored by several contributors. One essay shows how Romano Guardini's L'Esprit de la Liturgie indicated to the young poet the importance of form in the presentation of spiritual sentiment; another, framed by reference to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, presents the various representations of absence in the poems as the poet's measuring his distance from the heavenly ideal; a third discusses the rare appearances of Christ, arguing that Ullin, the recurrent, emblematic figure in the poetry, represents a kind of anti-Messiah. Indeed, Ullin features in another essay, which traces him back to a warrior hero of Irish mythology. Elsewhere, different forms of desire are shown to be central to La Tour du Pin's poetic endeavour, and the visual dimension is explored through landscapes which are shown to be artificial, imaginative constructions, projections of that very desire. The formal aspect is not neglected, and provides the volume's longest essay, by Jean-Michel Gouvard, the most prolific disciple of Benoît de Cornulier's school of metrical analysis. His discussion, with a useful diachronic perspective for those unfamiliar with post-Baudelairean metrical developments, proves the effectiveness of Cornulier's system, showing how moments of metrical ambivalence and indecision serve important rhetorical and expressive functions. This is convincingly developed in the following essay, which links the themes of enchantment and disenchantment to musicality, dissonance and the poetic subject's different voices. Notable for its variety, cohesion and not least the contributors' palpable enthusiasm for their subject, the volume is a useful research tool, ending with a thorough, well-organized bibliography which includes doctoral theses and mémoires de maîtrise.