Paul Claudel by Michael Donley, Gracewing, £12.99
The author subtitles his book “Poet of the Sacred Cosmos and Prophet of a Christian Ecology”, and it is from this perspective that he analyses the writing of the great French poet. Paul Claudel (1868-1955) is not well known in the English-speaking world, which is a pity. Like the later poetry of TS Eliot, Claudel’s verse was “simply the outcome of his profoundly orthodox understanding of Christianity”, in his case the Catholic faith. Claudel is too wide-ranging and complex a thinker to be pigeonholed simply as a “religious poet”. His large output, including plays, essays, diaries and letters, shows him to have been at the forefront of an early 20th-century renaissance in Christian artistic endeavour.
