ARAGON Louis (1897-1982). Lot n° 15

ARAGON Louis (1897-1982). MANUSCRIT autograph signed "Aragon", Une histoire contemporaine : Claude-André Puget, [1947]; 22 1/2 pages in-4 (some edges slightly frayed). Preface for Claude-André PUGET's collection of poems, La Nuit des temps (Clairefontaine, 1947). "Where does singing come from, and who is the singer? What is this murmuring madness in a young man, just waking up... What is this music in him, this need to communicate it to others through arrangements of words, arbitrary surely, arbitrary... They say he's a poet; he makes verses... [...] This century is a deep, dark well, and if I lean over the edge, what inexplicable things are at the bottom! [...] A poet, too, is a creature of time. [...] He thinks he's free, he invents his romance, he moves forward and begins to sing. [...] What are the Sinhalese poets like, or those from Carcassonne? Some write for the eyes, others are all voice, and I've known poets of absence, who took their greatness from what they didn't say. [...] It was around 1920, at the age of seventeen, in Nice, [...] that Claude-André Puget wrote the first poems that have come down to us from him!".... Arago then went through Puget's poetic work, from his first book, Pente ssssssur la meer... "It's a poetry of the fall. It's a poetry of the fall. That's why it despises drums and rhyme. It's an extraordinary thing, a song that is a song only because it is held back. This young man we are still hearing, what trouble was he expressing, what turmoil in these common poems, what sadness so different from the complaints of the Pléiade era, or from that nostalgia for Lamartine that we thought, taking him at his word, even at twenty, was still on the verge of death? [...] I'm not talking about influence: I'm just noting the analogies between song over a fairly short period of French poetry, as if at a given time singers couldn't get away from certain informal rules, a certain vocal framework, where song bends to new traditions, as demanding as those of the sonnet or the sextine. I love these early books, in which very young men reveal more about themselves than is apparent"... Etc.Aragon continues to explore and comment on Puget's various collections, making numerous quotations, ending with La Nuit des temps: "Yes, we are at a hinge in the century, at a threshold in the human adventure, and at this point of passage we must know how to read in the variations of poetry the variations of man. I followed this poet step by step for twenty years, and he may have seemed to follow only his reverie, but I know that like the reflections of a fire on the clouds, these variations from red to black through pink came from an external and distant inferno. Nothing is arbitrary in poetry, whatever one may think. And it is only at that moment when the poet's voice seems to lose itself in reality, that it sings at last, that it fills the heart with its music, and the eyes with tears, at that moment when poetry and man's destiny merge, in La Nuit des Temps"...