Poetry as memory: The wartime poetics of Louis Aragon, Rene Char, and Francis Ponge

In this dissertation, I examine poetry as a form of memory, looking particularly for moments where poems written by Louis Aragon, Rene Char, and Francis Ponge during WWII function in the manner of memory, that is, where evidence of a memory process can be found. In my first chapter, I analyze how Aragon uses the agency of remembering to construct his poems. Recollection is a major theme in his return to "traditional" forms of prosody, forms he claims to disrupt by an innovative use of rhyme. I argue, however, that his texts also reveal how poetry can produce acts of remembering through poetic sound play.;My second chapter offers a reading of Char' Feuillets d'ypnos. My argument is that while Char includes references to his participation in the Resistance, he writes from a point of affective tension between his experiences and his reflection on those experiences. In this process, he explores the present moment but maintains connections to other moments of time within his poetic fragments. I examine these connections, arguing that he offers an ethical way to move on after the war as he sets aside his experiences in order to keep writing. The memory of these experiences, however, like an "aroma," continues to linger into the present.;My third chapter is a study of Ponge' shift away from publishing "closed" poems to producing extensive journals that reveal his writing process. He presents remembering as an unfolding process that takes place in the act of writing. His method complicates our apprehension of memory and writing, and I argue that writing is itself a memory practice that compels Ponge to retrace the text' own past in order to produce a poem. In the end, he preserves references to his experiences within a form of writing that dynamically creates the associations for these experiences to be remembered. The work of all three poets reveals that remembering is a continuous reinterpretation of past experiences, a creative act anchored in historical events. At the same time, their poems as forms of memory also call for the reevaluation of the processes of remembering.