Articles

“Une Parole Totalement Intelligible”: Paul Claudel’s Cosmic Poetics

Thomas Pfau

Abstract

Thomas Pfau examines Paul Claudel’s "cosmic poetics" as an integration of being, knowing, and naming. Drawing on Thomistic realism and anticipating John Milbank’s "Christian ontology," Claudel rejects modern reductionism in favor of a rhythmic, "Gestalt-reading thinking." Through his poetic ontology and the Five Great Odes, Claudel presents the poetic word as a participation in the divine Logos, transforming the sensible world into a "totally intelligible word."

Citations

ŒPoét., 241–42.

FGO, 64–65

Olivier-Thomas Venard, A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality, trans. Kenneth Oakes and Francesca Aran Murphy (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 155.

Œuvres en Prose, ed. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpérine (Paris: Gallimard, 2965), 511

Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 134.

Heidegger, Being and Time (§ 7A)

Frizeau, July 20, 1905, in Correspondance Claudel–Jammes–Frizeau, 44.

Elizabeth M. Burslan and Judith Norman, eds., The Brill Companion to German Romantic Philosophy (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2018), 143–72.

John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 79–80.

Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Ark of Speech, trans. Andrew Brown (New York: Routledge, 2003), 132

Gabriel Frizeau, October 19, 1904, in Correspondence Claudel–Jammes–Frizeau (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 38.

Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 112, 166, 148.

Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur (Frankfurt, DE: Klostermann, 2004), 16.

Lauren E. Bergier, Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes: A Translation and Commentary (PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, submitted June 2018) (henceforth cited parenthetically as FGO). Available online at Knowledge@UChicago, https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1691?ln=en&v=pdf.

Chrétien, A Spacious Joy, 175.

Knowing the East, trans. James Lawler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 80.

Claudel, Knowing the East, trans. James Lawler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 46.

Claudel, A Poet Before the Cross (Providence, RI: Cluny, 2020), 168.

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 99 (par. #163).

Poetic Art, trans. Renée Spodheim (Providence, RI: Cluny, 2020), 56.

Claudel, ŒPoét., 258.

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 180.

Paul Claudel, Œuvre Poétique, ed. Jacques Petit (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 153–54.

Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge, 2003), esp. 322–30.

“Verset,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., Roland Greene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1514.

Jean Louis Chrétien, Spacious Joy: An Essay in Phenomenology and Literature, trans. Anne A. Davenport (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 166–87.

John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 10.

Paul Claudel, “Du Sens Figuré de l’Écriture” (“On the Figurative Sense of Scripture”), in Le Poète et la Bible, ed. Michel Malicet, Dominique Millet-Gérard, and Xavier Tilliette (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 845.

Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, edited and published by Martin Heidegger in 1928.

Jean-Louis Chrétien, A Spacious Joy, 171.

Stephen Lewis, “A Fitting Receptacle: Paul Claudel on Poetry and Sensations of God,” Logos 17, no. 4 (2014): 65–86, at 66.

Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 9–16.

Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 128, 133.

Paul Celan to H. Freund, 10 April 1961, in Briefe: 1934–1970, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt, DE: Suhrkamp, 2019), 502.

Nicolas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky: An Interpretation [1923], trans. Boris Jakim (San Rafael, CA: Semantron, 2009), 70.

Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. and ed. John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 265, 419.

Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 27–29 and 568–73.

Claudel, Mémoires improvisés (1954; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 81.

ŒPoét., 62.

Claudel, “Du Sens Figuré de l’Écriture,” 844.

Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Pfau, Romantic Moods (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 309–65.

“These Desiring Waters:’ The Hydrophilia of Claudel, Bachelard, and Chrétien,” in Finitude’s Wounded Praise: Responses to Jean-Louis Chrétien, ed. Philip J.P. Gonzales and Joseph M. McMeans (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023), 93–120, at 95, 97.

Lexi Eikelboom, Rhythm: A Theological Category (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 117–20 and 154–70.

Incomprehensible Certainty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 537–38 and 641–67.

“The Wanderer,” in Knowing the East, trans. James Lawler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 72

Connaissance de l’Est (ŒPoét., 85)

Roland Barthes, “Literature and Signification,” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 267.

Robert Royal, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 479–80.

A Spacious Joy, trans. Anne A. Davenport (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 174.

Marius-François Guyard’s introduction to his edition of Cinq Grandes Odes (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1990), 9–43.

Dominique Millet-Gérard, Le Verbe et La Voix (Paris: Garnier, 2018), 369–89.