What I wanted and tried to do : to pose the question of poetry as a witness to its own time : to this end, to analyze the paths of poetic creation in the great works of the past - recognized in their difference thanks to historical works - but also by observing, first and foremost in the being that we are, the circumstances and approaches - hesitations, contradictory aspirations, assertions of values even where we want facts to prevail - of the work to which we dedicate ourselves ; to recognize, at the point of origin of poetic intuition, the kinship of the enterprise of painters, musicians and poets, each of them strings of a single lyre ; and to understand, at the end of the inquiry if ever there was one, the nature and role of this " poetic function ", which we can see sometimes provides enough meaning for life to go on, despite the little response it knows it must expect from the natural place renounced as soon as language was established. A grand project ! But so vast, so ambitious, as to be reasonable. Clearly, such a project could only involve preliminary surveys. [...] There are minds that bet on language, but there are others who are immediately sensitive to the inadequacies and deceptions of this language, which they nonetheless love - being perhaps even among those who love it the most, a wounded, precarious presence. And for my part, I believe that it is only when one attaches oneself to him, and to his word, in this second way, with suspicion, a sense of exile within words, and therefore nostalgia, a surge of the whole being, a demand, that one reaches a sense of finitude that opens - and it is then poetry itself - to the memory of the immediate and to the experience of unity.
Yves Bonnefoy
The lecture summaries have been published under the title Lieux et destins de l'image (Seuil, 1999)
