Roger Cardinal – författare

Figures of Reality (1981) may be described as a polemic against those who feel poetry to be remote from normal life – an abstruse and empty game. The author argues from a contrary perspective, shared by many poets in the Romantic and Surrealist tradition, in which poetry is viewed as being vitally related to our awareness of reality. This penetrating discourse on the roots of poetry in the imagination suggests that the fascination of an illusory image lies precisely in our consciousness of its deflection from reality. Poets can take hold of and manipulate these moments; they are adept in the construction of unreality. The deliberate cultivation of such states of awareness has been a preoccupation of many poets and literary theorists, among them Coleridge, De Quincy and Rimbaud. Roger Cardinal’s commentaries on the writing of these men, as well as other texts drawn from nineteenth and twentieth century European poetry, argues that poems have meaning for us to the extent that we recognise the relationship of the figure of speech on the page to the ‘figure of reality’ as shaped by our perception of the world around us. In this way the book uniquely develops an original and subtle theory of the role of imagination in poetry.

Sensibility and Creation (1977) comprises a dozen critical studies by different contributors on a selection of major French poets of the twentieth century. These range from poets of long-established reputation, such as Paul Valéry, Pierre Reverdy, Saint-John Perse and Paul Eluard, to contemporary poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Dupin. The guiding theme is that of the characteristic sensibility which informs the creative work of each poet: the way he has of selecting and patterning the elements which make up the world he inhabits and which in a sense he is also creating. In some instances the poetry is examined for its selective textures and shapes, and in others the critical focus is more closely directed to the linguistic and stylistic strategies adopted by the writer.

Figures of Reality (1981) may be described as a polemic against those who feel poetry to be remote from normal life – an abstruse and empty game. The author argues from a contrary perspective, shared by many poets in the Romantic and Surrealist tradition, in which poetry is viewed as being vitally related to our awareness of reality. This penetrating discourse on the roots of poetry in the imagination suggests that the fascination of an illusory image lies precisely in our consciousness of its deflection from reality. Poets can take hold of and manipulate these moments; they are adept in the construction of unreality. The deliberate cultivation of such states of awareness has been a preoccupation of many poets and literary theorists, among them Coleridge, De Quincy and Rimbaud. Roger Cardinal’s commentaries on the writing of these men, as well as other texts drawn from nineteenth and twentieth century European poetry, argues that poems have meaning for us to the extent that we recognise the relationship of the figure of speech on the page to the ‘figure of reality’ as shaped by our perception of the world around us. In this way the book uniquely develops an original and subtle theory of the role of imagination in poetry.

Sensibility and Creation (1977) comprises a dozen critical studies by different contributors on a selection of major French poets of the twentieth century. These range from poets of long-established reputation, such as Paul Valéry, Pierre Reverdy, Saint-John Perse and Paul Eluard, to contemporary poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Dupin. The guiding theme is that of the characteristic sensibility which informs the creative work of each poet: the way he has of selecting and patterning the elements which make up the world he inhabits and which in a sense he is also creating. In some instances the poetry is examined for its selective textures and shapes, and in others the critical focus is more closely directed to the linguistic and stylistic strategies adopted by the writer.