Guillevic estimait que son humour n’avait pas été assez étudié. « Humour pour tenir », « humour pour aider à vivre », « humour pour filtrer l’horreur »... L’humour dont il s’agit n’est ni une ...décoration, ni un jeu de l’esprit, c’est un sourire proche de la nature et de la langue parlée, une force comme à l’affût du mystère de notre condition. Une fraternité. Parce qu’il considère que ces présents entretiens sont importants pour la compréhension de son œuvre, le poète a voulu leur donner comme titre Humour-Terraqué afin de les rattacher au recueil qu’il a le plus longtemps porté en lui.
Winspur examines the ways in which Francis Ponge and Eugene Guillevic recreate for their readers the natural silence of the meadows they chose to commemorate in writing. Of particular interest are ...the ways in which a natural, non-verbal, silence that characterizes the landscape addressed by each poem is transposed into the texts' verbal patterns, thus creating the impression that nature engages readers in a type of mute dialogue, or that its silence.
Concentrating on the major themes of man's relationship with the mineral and vegetal world around him and his desire to reconcile himself with the sometimes threatening, sometimes indifferent forces ...there, this dissertation offers a thematic analysis of Guillevic's poetry. After an introduction drawing on written sources and extensive interviews establishing Guillevic's background as a Breton and his place in French poetry, we examine the poet's mineral world, including water, earth and sky, from Brittany's mysterious megaliths and Celtic ruins to the ever-changing sea and the earth itself. These are essential metaphors for Guillevic: the mineral is infused with elemental life, alternatively offering danger and repose. Chapter III examines the vegetal world, arising organically from basic minerals. For the poet, roots, trees and flowers represent a second evolutionary stage. There is a strong sense of vertical movement and a living pyramid in which mineral and vegetal worlds form a continuum extending from the materiality of the earth to the subjective life of the poet. Man's perilous yet beneficial journey through this cosmos is traced in the fourth and fifth chapters, beginning with man's relationship with the material world, from stars to cities. The abstract realms of colors, motion and time are also part of the animistic universe, in which there is always danger of losing oneself. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this journey is the discovery of the saving power of Woman, both carnal and spiritual, whose love allows a meaningful rapport with the rest of the universe, from the simplest mineral to the most complex human. The conclusion brings us to the top of Guillevic's evolutionary structure--the poet's own inner life and creative activity. Since so much of his poetry is questioning and supposition, the dilemma of living in this universe is resolved primarily in the poetry itself. For Guillevic, the acts of discovery and understanding are inseparable from the act of creating. Thus, his work as a whole may be viewed as a vast Ars Poetica.
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