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For analytical psychologists who are not (or not yet) readers of poetry, this book is worth knowing about. For those who are fortunate enough to appreciate contemporary poetry in French the book is both interesting and valuable. It assembles the text of Bodart's long poem—mainly sonnets—La route du sel, first published in 1964, his own introductory commentary on it, some pages by Seghers, the poet and publisher of poetry, and the very substantial exposition by Gilberte Aigrisse. She is already known for her sensitive Psychothérapies analytiques: huit cas (reviewed in the July 1968 issue of this Journal), for her analysis of the poetry of Valéry and for an earlier volume on ancient Greece. She is searching for the springs of creativity, for the man behind the work, for the energy behind the odyssey, for the inner life which is mediated by those essential symbols, words. Aigrisse is concerned with the poet as maker, creator; she is not heavily analysing his imagery or interpreting his symbols, but is concerned principally with creative reverie.
Bodard was a Belgian poet whom it would be possible to see as influenced by some of the central tenets of surrealism. He wrote: ‘The poem makes itself in the poet, as it were without him; it happens … it is a sort of energy from afar, in one man's nerves, which then visits or charges other men with its electric current.’ Aigrisse shows, however, that he was not a true surrealist: it is not the intensity of the idiosyncratic image and the