Paul Claudel

Extract

Poetry and diplomacy are so rarely allied that there is the possibility of overlooking the fact that the great poet who has just died was also a distinguished diplomatist, ambassador at one time in Tokyo and at another in Washington, where he negotiated the Kellogg-Briand pact. This leading of a full life in the world of practical affairs and the simultaneous creation of an immense body of poetry, mystical in inspiration, denotes, not a dichotomy, but indeed a rare harmony. Claudel was not a poet who had strayed by chance or mischance into the diplomatic service; neither was he a professional diplomatist who wrote verse as a relaxation from official memoranda. He was at one and the same time a diplomatist by choice, rising through the various grades of consular service to ambassadorial status, and a poet from whose God-centred vision nothing human was alien. What influence his poetic genius may have had on his diplomatic activity one does not know, but it is clear that his poetry was enriched by the fulness of his human experience. It is rare nowadays for a poet to be a man taking full joy in all that is human, for whom the material world is a thing of beauty, yet who recognizes that the loveliness of God’s creation is but a foretaste of the absolute beauty which is in God. As he writes in his poem on St Teresa:

Si ce qui a l’air d’exister est beau, grand Dieu, que sera-ce de ce qui existe en effet?

Si nous nous réjouissons tellement du rossignol une seconde et de la rose,

Que dirons-nous de celui qui en est la provocation et la cause

Et dans le sein de qui la terre odorante tout entière se fond en ces pauvres expressions naïves?