Yves Bonnefoy, celebrated translator and critic, is widely considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. He is also a literary and art critic of renown; in writing extensively on the visual arts, he continues the critical tradition begun in the eighteenth century by Diderot and continued in succeeding centuries by Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and other leading French poets.

The sixteen essays collected here show the breadth and depth of Bonnefoy's writings on art, aesthetics, and poetics. His lyrical ruminations range across centuries and cultures, and artistic media, from Byzantium to postwar France, from the paintings of Piero della Francesca to the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti to the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, from the Italian Giorgio Morandi to the American Edward Hopper.

Always fascinated in his poetry by the nature of color and light and the power of the image, Bonnefoy continues to pursue these themes in his discussion of the lure and truth of representation. He sees the painter as a poet whose language is visual, and he seeks to find out what visual artists can teach those who work with words.

More philosophical than historical and more poetic than critical, the essays express Bonnefoy's deep sympathy for the creative process and his great passion for individual works of art.