Beautiful Letter D'Aragon IN Max - Pol Fouchet,Genuine Profession Of Faith / The

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Beautiful Letter D'Aragon IN Max - Pol Fouchet,Genuine Profession Of Faith / The:
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Magnificent letter from Aragon to Max-Pol Fouchet, a true profession of faith by the poetMagnificent letter from Aragon to Max-Pol Fouchet, a true profession of faith by the poet

Document type : signed autograph letter

Number of documents: 1 - Number of pages: 2 - Size: In-4

Place : Nice

Date : Mars 22 [1942]

RECIPIENT : Max-Pol Fouchet (1913-1980), poet and writer

State : minor flaws

Magnificent letter from Aragon, a true profession of faith by the poet, written after the publication of poems by Max-Pol Fouchet in homage to the tragic death of his wife, Jeanne Ghirardi, drowned on January 9, 1942, in the sinking of the Lamoricière, in the off the Balearic Islands.

“My dear Max,

I wanted to write this number to you right away, but life disposes of me, and above all Henri Matisse with whom I spend my time (I'm writing a book with him, and he does my portrait). Finally it's raining, this spring begins with a stormy sea under my windows, and I find the isolation necessary to talk to you.

I wanted to tell you that from this number I only saw, I only remembered your poems. I dreamed about it for a long time, I keep coming back to it. The dream we have of such poems would be badly summed up by words that would not be taken from the poems themselves: You yield instantly like the birds to the wind, and there is nothing to say either about this terrible presence, which absence doubles so terribly. I say it like a coat.

I wondered what I liked about these verses. I wondered if it was them, or their unexpected tragic continuation. Each word, with this perspective, loses its gratuitousness, becomes serious, falls like a stone into a well, the lightest, the birdest of the words used. So I tried to read, to reread these six poems as if nothing had happened […]. The thrill entered, took hold of them. What was so detached bleeds. And we have the same eyes before the same horror. Thus these poems bring the painful proof of a strange truth: that the event and the poem cannot be separated, that it is vain to attempt it, and that there is nothing so far, I would say of the spiritual exercise, than poetry, which is the resonance of the world, the harmonic common to the author and the reader. So, you will say, these poems, their strength is not what I put in them, but what adds Jeanne who perishes at sea? That's misunderstanding me. Although I believe with the sincerity of my heart that these poems begun by you, she has in truth completed them for you… Pardon me, my friend, what is cruel in these considerations, they are the opposite of insensitivity, indifference. I only think that a thing written is never finished by the fact that it is written, no more than the man brought into the world. I want to talk about what is not stillborn, like these poems so well finished by the hand of a master […] (you know that I am thinking of Valéry, and his precursors). A thing written, if in it there is heavenly fire, it will one day set fire to the paper that bears it. She will be able to sleep for a long time, a gust of wind will awaken the spark, a fact external to the poem. And it's a new generation, for example, and Rimbaud ceases to be the author of the Sonnet des Voyelles. It takes revolutions and wars for certain verses to finally take on their resonance. The external event, the social event for example. For these "Limits of Love", it was necessary, in order for them to be truly sensitized to others, that lightning should strike. Lightning fell, my poor Max, but in the flash of lightning we saw your face, and Jeanne's, she would have (I think) liked that.

Certainly, of these six poems, it is the second (A cloud always passes) that touches me most directly […]. If I tell you, my friend, that all our thoughts, all the images that respond profoundly to our particular being, resemble those dreams that are repeated in our nights, through the months, the years, and which leave us on waking a strange concern, if I tell you that the thoughts we have when we are ready to die, those famous memories of which we say so banally that through them we see our whole life again in a few moments, are similar to those dreams I was talking about, if I told you that the most beautiful images of poets are nothing else, that they touch us because they make an image, a memory, with a fact of life, a forgotten dream, a song heard... Will you understand where I want to come? I was talking about harmonics: you know, there is the well-known experience of the vase breaking on a note played on the piano which alone made it vibrate, because it carried it within itself. And what would be the most beautiful image in the world, the most classic "the rose of your lips", to the blind man who has never seen a rose, to one who does not know the softness of lips? The image is not made only of words, poetry is the rare and terrible coincidence of words and things. The limits of love are the limits of poetry […]”.

Louis Aragon (Paris, 1897/1982)French poet, close to Dadaism and Surrealism.