Yves Bonnefoy lettore di Baudelaire

This paper aims to retrace the history of Yves Bonnefoy’s involvement with Baudelaire, who was always at the center of his reflections. The first and the second part focus on the importance of Baudelaire’s work for the evolution of the Bonnefoy’s poetical thought since his preface of 1955 in which he showed the importance of death, and the meaning of human destiny as a “vérité de parole”. At the same time, the originality of his critical essays is due to a constant investigation of the psychological, biographical and literary sources of Baudelaire’s inspiration in a world characterized by the crisis of all religious values. The third and the fourth part analyze the lesson and the “example of Baudelaire”, in order to explain how Bonnefoy’s theoretical work on him finds in his own poetry a sort of powerful and “critical” accomplishment. This is quite clear specially in the poem Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire, an example of a poetical criticism implying philological and hypo-textual knowledge that allows to perceive in mythological sources and in real life the implications of a mistery concerning identity.