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Book Reviews and Short Notices

This is Bernard Bonnejean’s third book about French Catholic poets, and it is the most interesting and ambitious of them all. Herein, Bonnejean, a former doctoral student of Steve Murphy, confronts three problems inscribed in the project of Catholic poetry as undertaken by Paul Claudel, Francis Jammes and Charles Péguy, and anticipated by Paul Verlaine. First, is the nature of a dogma-structured religion contrary to the artistic freedom of the poet; second, what is the nature of inspiration in Catholic poetry; and third, is there a metaphysical dimension in Catholic poetry which makes the creative artist a co-operator with divine creativity? The reader will instantly seize on the challenge this book poses: Bonnejean expects those at the back of the class who have not read the catechism recently to keep up! Bonnejean in other words practises a kind of theologo-literary criticism, though at least two of the three substantial chapters in this book evoke theological themes in ways that relate them to questions posed by irreligious writers too. Chapter 1 undertakes discussion of the concept of inspiration, both natural and biblical. Chapter 2 raises the question of metaphysical meaning in the aesthetics of poetry, though the symbolic resources which Catholicism gave to Claudel are arguably understated. Chapter 3 is the most interesting but also the most problematic of all; while there is useful discussion of poetic techniques in Verlaine, Jammes, Claudel and Péguy, the author’s conclusion—drawn from Claudel—that the more elevated the aim of the poetry, the more it will tend towards classicism, seems to contradict his own discussion of Claudel’s poetic technique with its roots not so much in classical but in Hebrew literary models. Pierre Brunel has congratulated Bonnejean for casting light on a field somewhat neglected in the last few decades. But Paul Cooke’s observation (MCF, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 487–488) that Richard Griffiths is a better guide to this material than Bonnejean—an observation with which I agree—only bears out the fact that both Bonnejean and Griffiths undertake a similar theologo-literary criticism which tends to render its object exotic, even as it explains it. There is of course no way around unpacking the complexities of Catholic literature in the attempt to address its inner coherence; indeed,