On April 4th, 1946, Paul Claudel was elected a member of the French Academy by 24 votes out of 25, the 25th being an abstention. The recognition was tardy, for he was in his 78th year; and in reversing the resounding rejection of 1935 the Academy was only ratifying the place he occupies as one of the foremost modern poets, and the greatest modern Catholic poet.

It is opportune to analyse his poetic theory.

Not indeed that the hostility shown to Claudel in 1935 was mainly for literary reasons. These existed, certainly: a deliberate departure from accepted rule and custom, an apparently lawless technique and a degree of obscurity that seemed to flout the reader, a most personal choice of subjects and use of words as well as disconcerting syntax, transitions, sudden changes of tone, mingling of the loftiest with the most colloquial language. His poetic system, wrote a critic of the time, ‘goes counter to all the advances laboriously realised since Ronsard and even Villon’. But there was also the strongest opposition on political and personal grounds: it is painful for example to read the virulent article in which Léon Daudet (Action Française, 3 Avril 1935), exults over Claudel’s defeat, having first recorded his own early admiration for the poet.

Claudel though an official was no politician. His consular and diplomatic career was a step-by-step achievement of steady work. He contrasts himself in this respect with Mallarmé the professor-poet, who hated his teaching and never crossed the Pont de l’Eveque ‘without feeling inclined to throw himself over the parapet’.