Jaccottet, Philippe (b. 1925). Poet. Swiss by birth, Jaccottet settled in a French village in the Drôme, a region of wooded hills and mountainous prospects from which he derives a landscape poetry of nonspecific and universal resonance. The early verse collections L'Effraie (1953) and L'Ignorant (1958) address notions of place, moment, and obliviousness to self, ascribing poetic virtue to the ephemeral nuance of non-human life. Trees and birds, rain and snow, moon and stars are the archetypal features of a world dense with intimations of harmony and transfiguration. Inspired by Hölderlin, Rilke, and Ungaretti, each of whom he has translated, Jaccottet celebrates those rare moments of participatory insight when contingent phenomena, lyrically voiced, accede to the status of metaphor or metaphysical symbol. The haiku-like poems of Airs (1967) epitomize a ‘crystalline’ aesthetic of laconic poise; while the more ruminative verse of Pensées sous les nuages (1983), the meandering prose of Paysages avec figures absentes (1970), and the scattered notations serially issued under the title La Semaison (1963, 1971, 1984) reflect a never-assuaged Romantic yearning to elicit higher meaning from the scrutiny of natural signs.

[Roger Cardinal]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.