In his 1957 La Promenade sous les arbres we read that Philippe Jaccottet’s principal endeavour in writing this early book centres upon a gesture, of necessity filtered through language’s strongly felt relativities, to “define […] what I must in effect call a poetical experience” (LPSLA, 13). It is an endeavour that will occupy most of his life and is, from the outset, to be understood not as an effort to penetrate the strange power of textual matter, but rather one urging upon him the endless enigma of the impact of the physical world, its trees and flowers and birds, its sky and light and air, and the fused sensual and spiritual stirrings occasioned by such a simultaneously constant and shifting impact. The 1990 …
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Citation: Bishop, Michael. "Cahier de verdure". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 August 2014 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31089, accessed 16 February 2025.]
