René Char

René Char (1907-1988), French poet and member of the French Resistance movement during World War II (1939-1945). As a literary descendant of French poet Arthur Rimbaud and the surrealists, who drew upon their subconscious for inspiration, Char believed poetry could provide a nonrational understanding of a constantly shifting and mysterious world.

Char was born in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a village in the region of Provence in southern France. He awakened to a love for poetry upon reading the poems of French surrealist writer Paul Éluard. In the early 1930s, by then a poet himself, Char befriended French surrealist poets André Breton and Louis Aragon, and he collaborated with them in an experiment in collective writing. Char’s first independently written collection of surrealist poems, Le marteau sans maître (1934; translated as The Hammer without a Master, 1976), was later put to music by French composer Pierre Boulez.

When World War II broke out, Char became a leader of the underground movement against the Germans and participated in numerous acts of sabotage and secret parachute drops behind enemy lines. He joined General Charles de Gaulle in 1944 in Algeria and participated in the liberation of Paris from German occupation in August of that year. From the end of the war until his death in 1988, Char devoted himself to poetry. He spent much of his life in his native Provence, writing and conferring with his friends, who included French writer Albert Camus and German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Char wrote tributes to those who most influenced his concept of poetry, including Rimbaud, as well as poems inspired by surrealism. Two collections published after the war reflect his experience in the Resistance: Seuls demeurent (Alone Remain, 1945) and Feuillets d’Hypnos (1946; Leaves of Hypnos, 1973). Many of Char’s poems, including “Congé au vent” (Notice to the Wind) and “Biens égaux” (Equal Blessings), also capture the rustic atmosphere of his beloved Provence. Others, less descriptive, evoke the secret and elusive beauty of existence through concise, dense phrases. Char wrote and wanted to be read with passionate intuition. He is considered one of the most important French poets of the post-World War II era.