The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems

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CHARLES PEGUY is the only poet of consequence during the last fifty years in France whose work has failed to arouse the smallest critical interest in this country. Compared with Claudel or Valery, to mention two of his contemporaries, he has simply fallen flat. It almost seems as though the term ‘poetry’ were out of place, or as though, and this is perhaps nearer the truth, the conception of poetry his work implied placed it outside the pale of contemporary criticism. There seems to be nothing for criticism to get its teeth into. Everything is plain sailing. There is no shell to crack, no secret to explore, no difficulty of language, no impenetrable thought, no interplay of images to be unraveled. In whatever direction the critic looks, whether at the technique, the ideas, the images of the psychological sphere, there is nothing to be done, or at any rate nothing worth doing.
–From the Introduction Charles Peguy (1873-1914) was a noted French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing but nonpracticing Roman Catholic. From that time on, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.