La Poesie Impie Ou Le Sacre Du Poete: Sur Quelques Modernes (Abstract in English; Text in French) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In France, the "modern" generation of poets--like Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud--had the ambition to give birth to a new conception of the sacred. Until then, the sacred was the experience of a transcendence whose inscrutable profundity language had to strive to reach. With poetic modernity, it is the immanence of poetic structure that contains and distills the sacral dimension. The poem is henceforth sacred because it is secret, locked up on itself and from the inside. It is secret in the etymological meaning of the word secretus: it is the mystery. Dreaming language, language of dream, lost tongue--these are the founding and heroic permutations of poetic modernity, a new sacred which disposes transcendence within structure. **********