About the French poet Philippe Jaccottet...

Saw this lovely introduction of the French poet Philippe Jaccottet in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry:

The critic Jean Starobinski has written of Jaccottet: " To be an ignorant man, to possess nothing but a fragile word, to find oneself as if relying upon darkness and nothingness: that is the position from which one must be constantly setting out. Setting out, starting again: Jaccottet doesn't resign himself to immobility, he doesn't submit to failure. When he writes, 'to start from nothing, that's my rule,' we recognize a necessary premise -- nothingness -- but also an indication of departure. Departure on the roads of the earth, without hope of conquest, with no certain goal. But the word to which this gives rise, born of darkness and nothingness, carries within it the possibility of a journey into light. Jaccottet is one of the great poets of daybreak."