Drama Between Earth and Skies: Nietzsche, Saint-John Perse, Yves Bonnefoy

Abstract

This paper begins with Nietzsche’s claim that all understanding is anthropomorphic in origin, and attempts to show how the poets Saint-John Perse and Yves Bonnefoy have essentially inverted human belief systems. Systems of thought once founded on an understanding of the skies as the seat of powers greater than human powers and beyond our human capacity for understanding have been replaced in the works of these poets by human experience that relates our physical presence in the world. As Nietzsche also claims, however, our language is only a metaphor for the objects it names, implying that language does not reveal objects of the real world but only incorporates them, as it were, into our conceptual apparatus. Now Perse and Bonnefoy both make a conscious effort to renew our relation to the world we live in and to transpose, one could say, our desire for knowledge of the unknown onto the objects of the physical world constituted in our experience of place.