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Jules Supervielle is a poet of an interior, imagined reality. He creates cosmic spaces in which he finds himself befriended by the stars and the planets, he stretches out his hand to touch clouds and invisible mountains. This imagined reality is not produced by simple fantasy, it emerges from the complicity of silence between the poet and the stars, a silence that gives birth to words for these poems of exploration. The stars become part of the poet, part of his "univers interieur," which we are led into, until, at the very moment we think ourselves at the furthest remove from Earth, we are brought into the living presence of a man, here, now, before us.

In the poem I am about to quote I have tried to capture in English the interpenetration of the spaces of the universe with the fact of death, a coming together that gives the French a life of surprises and beauty. The original can be found in Choix des Poemes (Gallimard), p. 108.

                                  THE NEXT ROOM

                                  Turn your back on him
                                  But stay at his side
                                  (Turn your eyes away,
                                  They're so muddled and so crude)
                                  Keep standing but don't speak,
                                  Can't you see he hardly knows
                                  Day from night
                                  Or the sky
                                  From the pain that goads him?
                                  Turn off the light
                                  And watch: his veins shine.
                                  And when he lifts his hand
                                  The light of jewels
                                  Rises from the night,
                                  Shines from his fingers.
                                  Leave him alone on his bed,
                                  Time tucks him in, time rocks him,
                                  In full view of the sticks and stones
                                  Where the sleepless
                                  Toss and moan.
                                  No one must open his door,
                                  A big dog, who's lost his memory
                                  Would soon get free
                                  And search the earth
                                  And sea from shore to shore
                                  For the man he left behind,
                                  Motionless, with stiff,
                                  Exacting hands.

Commonly, Supervielle is able to create the world he chooses to explore out of the plainest language. He writes: "I myself only succeed in approaching my essential secrets and decanting my deeper poetry through the use of simplicity and transparency. To let the supernatural become natural and flow without effort (or seem to), to proceed in such a way that the ineffable becomes familiar, at the same time that it retains its fabulous roots, these are my aims." Supervielle here shows us the essential essence of his poetry. He is able to bring into language the closeness to him of the world's presence, without irony, ambiguity, or that opalescent originality of poets like Michaux, Hart Crane or Hopkins. He has no need to conquer and possess the world for he has already resigned himself to it in being part of it: neither do we find that agonised meditation on the abyss between the self and the world that so distracted Reverdy and Eliot. His is the poetry of celebration: his language, sometimes wavering on the edge of too great a sweetness, takes strength and terseness from the inevitability of the poetry's revelation to us of that life, that unsayable centre, that lies equally within the most familiar of objects and the furthest of the stars.

His language, in its very plainness, insists upon the specific nature of each thing: for Supervielle, as one thing continually transforms itself into another, it does not do so at the expense of the other, rather do we enter a world where things are separate and yet related. What is shared is a common life. One of Supervielle's most lovely poems is "Hommage a la Vie," which may be read on p. 258 of Choix des Poemes. I have recast this poem as a homage that considers the life of the poet also.

                                  HOMAGE TO JULES SUPERVIELLE

                                  It's good to be part
                                  Of a live house
                                  And to split time
                                  With a whole heart,
                                  To see my hands
                                  Go round the world
                                  Like an apple that lands
                                  In a small back-yard,
                                  To love the earth,
                                  The moon and the sun
                                  Like old friends
                                  Who have no end,
                                  To learn by heart
                                  The world's course
                                  Like a bright rider
                                  On his black horse,
                                  To give eyes
                                  To these words: girl, child,
                                  To be a shore
                                  For wandering lands,
                                  To reach the soul
                                  With muffled oars
                                  So it's not scared
                                  To have me there.
                                  It's good to know
                                  How leaves can shade
                                  And to feel age
                                  Creep over my skin,
                                  To go with the blood
                                  Through my veins
                                  And gild its dark
                                  With a waiting star,
                                  To have all these words
                                  Said in my head
                                  And give the least liked
                                  A little spree,
                                  And to see life,
                                  Eager, disturbed,
                                  Sadden and free
                                  Your poetry.

The imagery of space, here most obvious in the images of travel (Supervielle spent much time travelling on the Altantic, between Bordeaux and Montevideo), occurs again in poems where he explores the universe of his own body, a matter of concern to him because of his weak heart. In the volume La Fable du Monde (1938) he develops his central image of space, that of the poet as a lonely sailor in search of his own terra incognita:

     Ton sol interieur est la avec ses golfer et ses terres sans merci,
     Et to es celui qui monte dans une barque et part tout seal dans le silence de lui-meme,
     Tu regardes passer let propres falaises ou to ne vois pas ame qui vive . . .

Dorothy Blair, citing this passage, says: "The image is henceforth never lost, emerging here and there as one of the major themes in every succeeding volume, until there comes a sort of fusing of the inner and outer worlds, as the poet seeks more and more to break down the barrier separating the tangible from the intangible, the personal from the external, the Moi from the Non-moi."

The imagery of the stars and the imagery of the body thus emerge from the one recognition, that of being and our relation to it. Supervielle has created a poetry that is no longer that of the enclosed self, of the personality, but of a man's whole presence in and with the world. His language is not that of a voice idiosyncratic in conversation, it is a language that speaks with the presences it celebrates, that achieves the true impersonality of a poetry that, at its best, seems written by language itself.

It is here that the similarity of Supervielle's concerns to those of such masters as Williams and Stevens comes clear. Marcel Raymond has written: "In the words of Pierre Gueguen, he (Supervielle) is the anti-Narcissus eager to break the prison of the self, to escape from the jealous surveillance of the soul; he is 'porous to the external,' porous to the infmite, eager to rediscover himself in the beasts, the waters, the stones, born perhaps from some breeze under the open skies of the pampas, or from the white foam of the South Atlantic under a night crackling with stars. For him, in contrast to the surrealists, the universe is "infinitely innervated".

To see what Supervielle and Stevens share is to see what they s' la re of the central perceptions of the poetry of our time, perceptions that in turn place them among the undisputed masters of that poetry. This is the closing stanza of 'A Primitive Like An Orb:'

                                  That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears,
                                  The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
                                  Each one, his fated eccentricity,
                                  As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
                                  Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
                                  Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
                                  Of colour, the giant of nothingness, each one
                                  And the giant ever changing, living in change.

Supervielle has returned, like Williams and Stevens, to the sources of the imagination, so renewing, if only for a moment, our world, as the poems carry us from ourselves into our true place. The last words should be those of Supervielle himself:

"In my case, inspiration is generally manifested by the feeling that I am everywhere at one time, quite as well in space as in the various regions of heart and thought. The mood of poetry comes to me then from  a sort of magic confusion in which ideas and images come to life and discard their sharp edges . . . For the mind, which is mixed with dream, contraries no longer exist: affirmation and negation become one and the same thing, as do past and present, despair and hope, madness and reason, death and life. An inner song becomes audible, it chooses the words that are suitable. I give myself the illusion of helping darkness in its effort towards light, while just beneath the surface of the paper, the images that were stirring, clamouring down below, begin to break through. After this, I myself know a little better where I stand; I have created  dangerous forces, and I have exorcised them. I have made them allies of my innermost reason."