René Char

René Char (1907-1988) is among the most crucial of twentieth-century writers. An early Surrealist and close friend of the visual artists Braque, Giacometti, and Picasso, during World War Two he was a leader in the underground French Resistance and later an ardent opponent of nuclear technology. His poetry confronts the moral, political, and artistic challenges of modernity with a prophetic eloquence comparable to the poet-philosophers of ancient Greece.