dublinka

As an admirer of the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, I've always been a little disappointed that she never wrote poetry. One possible reason, is that she felt that much of the content of poetry, held little meaning for her; because it described an unreal or a mythological woman.

This idea can be found in her writing in The Second Sex, where she observes that in the poetic universe of Breton, woman "tears man from the sleep of immanence; mouth, key, door, bridge, she is Beatrice leading Dante into the beyond." and that: "This unique woman, at once carnal and artificial, natural and human, casts the same spell as the equivocal objects dear to the surrealists: she is like the spoon-shoe, the table-wolf, the marble-sugar that the poet finds at the flea market or invents in a dream; she shares in the secret of familiar objects suddenly revealed in their true nature, and in the secret of plants and stones. She is all things." All, de Beauvoir notes, except herself.

That is not to say, that she rejected poetry out of hand. In fact, the solution to the conundrum, she points out, exists in a letter belonging to Rimbaud. She declares that woman will be a full human being, when "the infinite bondage of woman is broken, when she will live in and for herself, man -hitherto detestable -having let her go free.