The question of the relationship between aesthetics and history is reconsidered in this study of these postwar poets. Petterson argues that postwar French poetry is a critical poetry encompassing a vast poetic tradition from poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Francis Ponge and Paul Celan. The author also shows how the critical writings of Hegel, Heidegger, and Ricoeur (among others) suggest that what he calls postwar poetry’s will-to-meaning and its attempt to develop a post-Romantic poetics necessarily questions poetry’s ties to philosophical, historical, and political narratives.