The Holy Innocents
by Charles Peguy
Category: Poetry

“CHARLES PÉGUY is the only poet of consequence during the last fifty years in France whose work has failed to arouse the smallest critical interest in this country. Compared with Claudel or Valéry, to mention two of his contemporaries, he has simply fallen flat. It almost seems as though the term ‘poetry’ were out of place, or as though, and this is perhaps nearer the truth, the conception of poetry his work implied placed it outside the pale of contemporary criticism. There seems to be nothing for criticism to get its teeth into. Everything is plain sailing. There is no shell to crack, no secret to explore, no difficulty of language, no impenetrable thought, no interplay of images to be unraveled. In whatever direction the critic looks, whether at the technique, the ideas, the images of the psychological sphere, there is nothing to be done, or at any rate nothing worth doing.” —From the Introduction