A Poetics of the Image: Paul Celan and Andre du Bouchet

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What is an image? Literary imagery is often understood as figurative speech. But images can also be visual in artworks. They can be abstract, too, if mankind is understood as an image of God. Similarly, Plato often speaks of ideas and forms in visual terms. The question of the image prompted debates in philosophy, theology, and art history for many centuries, which had a profound impact upon two of the twentieth century’s most significant European poets: the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) and French-Jewish poet Andre du Bouchet (1924-2001). Through a wide-ranging comparative analysis of these two poets’ work, this study proposes a new understanding of the role of the image in poetry, as well as a new way of reading the two writers’ oeuvres.

Julian Johannes Immanuel Koch is a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.