René Char's provincial origins and modest lifestyle may belie the intellectual breadth and universal relevance of his poetry, written over seventy years. His early affiliation with the Surrealists, his fecund association and collaboration with artists he knew and admired, his political conscience, sharpened by his Resistance activities in World War II, confirm him as a poet and man of his times. Art, war and the precariousness of the human condition as they touched a century are matters upon which his poetry insistently dwells. Yet to that world vision he brings the wisdom of one imbued with the immutable laws of the Provence in which he was raised and which he loved so well. The circumstantial and the enduring are never far apart in the Charian world. Meditation upon the present…
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Citation: Lancaster, Rosemary. "René Char". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 November 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=826, accessed 19 April 2024.]
