ABSTRACT
Baudelairean lucidity has frequently been judged a dubious virtue. Bonnefoy's engagement with Baudelaire's ethical lucidity has continued up to the present. At the heart of Bonnefoy's analysis is the way Baudelaire's changing attitudes to Rubens expressed a shift, in the poet's moral understanding, towards the importance of not forgetting ordinary reality and the real human beings who play a part in the lives. The value of these, essentially poetic, speculations and assertions on Bonnefoy's part is the evidence they give of the evolution of his own conception of poetry, and of the notion of presence, towards the arena of everyday human intercourse, and thus towards the necessity for ethical lucidity. In the logic of this poem, the letters JGF. are both the emblem of a love rooted in ethical lucidity and an enactment of the benison Jeanne's succour might have represented.
