Mauriac: The Poetry of a Novelist

by Paul Cooke

Although internationally renowned as a novelist, journalist, and essayist, Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac (1885-1970) never established a reputation as a poet. Yet it was Maurice Barrès’s favourable review of his first collection of verse, Les Mains jointes, that launched Mauriac’s career in 1910. He went on to publish three further collections of poems and insisted to the end of his life that, despite critical neglect of his verse, he remained first and foremost a poet. This book offers the first ever in-depth exploration of the whole of Mauriac’s verse output. After a chapter tracing his general conception of poetry and comparing his ideas to those of other poets and theorists, each of Mauriac’s verse collections is analysed in turn, as are many of his poems that were published exclusively in literary journals. A final chapter explores the significant relationship between Mauriac’s verse and his novels, revealing the multiple connections between these two series of texts. This volume will appeal to those with an interest in twentieth-century French poetry and, more generally, to those interested in the relationship between verse and prose.

280 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003