perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century. Bonnefoy was also a respected critic and scholar, as well as a fine translator.

Bonnefoy's father was a railroad employee, his mother a teacher. After studying mathematics at the University of Poitiers, the young poet moved to Paris, where he came under the influence of the Surrealists. His first poetry collection, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (1953; On the Motion and Immobility of Douve), explored the relation of poetry to life. In Bonnefoy's thought, poetry might be said to be a closed universe that only lives when it is shattered by an intuition of the “real world.” He spoke of poetry as at its best expressing “temps transfiguré par l'instant” (“time transfigured by the moment”), a conceptual, progressive world shattered and enlivened by an instant's intuition brought by a ray of sun or other phenomenon of the natural world. His own poetry beautifully illustrated his thought in several volumes, including Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987; In the Shadow's Light) and Début et fin de la neige (1991; The Beginning and End of Snow).

Bonnefoy held the chair in comparative poetics at the Collège de France between 1981 and 1994. His criticism explored painting as well as literature, and several of his essays were brought together in the English-language volume The Lure and the Truth of Painting (1993). He also compiled the Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionelles et du monde antique (1981; “Dictionary of Mythologies and Religions of Traditional Societies and the Ancient World,” Eng. trans. Mythologies).