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     Because of his close personal ties with the Cubist painters, for whom he was an enthusiastic and perspicacious apologist, and because (not surprisingly) there are certain similarities between the imagery of his poems and that of Cubist pictures, Pierre Reverdy has been termed a Cubist poet. It is hard to see how this particular movement in the visual arts, with its insistence on a special way of depicting objects in plastic terms, could be transferred to the verbal art of poetry. In the introduction to his translation of Reverdy’s Selected Poems Kenneth Rexroth replies to the question, What is Cubism in poetry ? “It is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture.” This is an unimpeachable definition of Cubism in painting, but seems almost meaningless as applied to poetry. In painting, the elements to be dissociated and recombined are given in the world of objects and it is an easy matter for the painter to set about consciously rearranging them in the manner described. The poet, however, is dealing with mental images that do not exist until he creates them (or allows them to well up from his unconscious, as the case may be). Far from taking an image and deliberately dissociating and recombining it, the image comes to him precisely in its final form. If it has undergone the process described, this can only have taken place unconsciously. If it were carried out “consciously and deliberately” the result could only be something comparable to the bizarre artificialities of Mannerism.

     In any case, Reverdy himself vigorously protested against the expression “Cubist literature”. “Why try to describe one art by a term that already describes another art ?” he wrote. Only, he continued, because no other, more appropriate term has been found. Reverdy made the point that we do not baptise ourselves and that it was not up to him to find a name for the kind of poetry he was writing. But he emphatically denied that it was Cubist. (A Propos de l’Expression: “Littérature Cubiste” in Nord-Sud, No.13, March 1918).

     On the other hand, he did make a number of very clear statements regarding his intentions and his view of poetry. One of the most explicit and succinct appeared as a note to be inserted in the press copies of his book Epaves du Ciel.

     “Poetry, in appearance the most calm, is nonetheless the true drama of the soul, its deep and stirring activity. Poems are the final result of that movement which, born in the most intimate regions of consciousness, ends up on the outside, just as luminous bubbles rise to the surface from the depths of springs to burst and dissolve in the light.

     “What always disquiets the poet is his soul and the relationships that link it, not without obstacles, with the exterior world of the senses. Poetry may be obscure and yet spring from a limpid soul - just as the clearest water appears black, because of its depth…. Every poem is one facet of the image, the photograph of one of its multiple aspects. It is in order to maintain a constant control over his soul that the poet writes.

     “A murky soul could not help producing a murky poetry.”

     “The reality of the poem is in proportion to the yearning of the poet’s soul for reality.”

     “And poetry is only the result of this yearning for an absolute reality on a plane upon which nothing can operate but the impulses of a great power of intuition in combination with an extremely acute sense of the most distant connections that unite all things.”

     In its insistence on the relationship between inner and outer world, between subjective and objective, and on the role of poetry in maintaining the poet’s psychic equilibrium, this statement, written in 1924, has evident points of contact with the formulations presented in the Surrealist Manifesto that same year. It is not surprising that André Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault should have stated over their collective signatures that Reverdy was “the greatest poet at present living” and that by comparison with him they themselves were “only children”.

     The poet’s situation vis-a-vis the world about him is further defined in answers given by Reverdy during a radio interview in 1952, in which he stated

     “The sources of contemporary poetry cannot be very different from what they have always been the poet himself face to face with, above all, social reality, to which he does not adapt.

     “The impossibility of letting himself be absorbed and assimilated, of enjoying it to the full, compels the poet to discover within himself the means to live and breathe, his reason for being and for supporting himself . . . .

     “I believe that the profound intention of the poet is to be, and to be according to the demands imposed upon him by his nature, of which no one, not even he himself, could be aware if he did not manage to express himself, to prove to himself that he exists, to find his identity, the only one that counts in his eyes.”

     As an author of poems in prose, Reverdy is in the direct line that leads in French poetry from Aloysius Bertrand, author of Gaspard de la Nuit through Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Although prose poetry represents only one aspect of Reverdy’s work, it is perhaps the genre that gave him the greatest scope for the free expression of his imaginative power and ability to create haunting and magical effects, a mysterious world that is overwhelmingly convincing despite all its contradictions of commonplace logic. He wrote four volumes composed exclusively of prose poems, Poèmes en Prose (1915), his first published work, Etoiles Peintes, (1921), Flaques de Verre (1929), and La Liberté des Mers (1956, first published 1963), and a fifth, La Balle au Bond (1928), in which prose poems greatly outnumber those in verse. In addition, poems in prose are scattered throughout all his volumes composed predominantly of poems in verse.

     Some of Reverdy’s views on the prose poem are contained in a short article that appeared in Nord-Sud, no.3, 15 May 1917, a translation of which is reproduced below. This piece was written as a reply to the preface to Max Jacob’s volume of prose poems Cornet a Dès (September 1916), in which Jacob - while acknowledging Rimbaud’s role in widening the field of sensibility - dismisses Baudelaire, Mallarmé amd Rimbaud himself, along with their followers, and holds up Bertrand (whose role as a forerunner is conceded by all), Jules Renard and Marcel Schwob (author of the touching but not very epoch-making Livre de Monelle) as the true originators of the prose poem. Jacob finds Rimbaud guilty of ignoring the laws of art and considers that to follow his example will lead only to “confusion and exasperation”, while he dismisses the prose poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud as mere parables or fables. How far Jacob succeeded in avoiding the errors he ascribes to others does not concern us here. Suffice it to say that his dogmatic statements spurred Reverdy to a brief exposition of his own ideas that clearly acknowledges his debt to Rimbaud. This reply to Jacob does not touch upon the question of what distinguishes a poem in prose from a poem in verse. However, in the same radio interview referred to above, Reverdy makes it very clear that he attaches very little importance to form.

     “As to form. it is accorded an importance that it cannot have in our epoch, when anguish and the discomfort of living compel us to struggle, above all, to break the pane of glass and not suffocate. In any case, I have always thought that form is only the most evident part of the inner content - what the skin is to what lies within.”

     We may assume therefore, that there was no fundamental difference in Reverdy’s approach as between the poem in prose and the poem in verse. There can be little doubt, however, that the brilliance of his example has contributed to the important position occupied by the prose poem in contemporary French literature and hence, indirectly, in poetry everywhere.