ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the debates which preceded the entrance of Yves Bonnefoy and the poets of presence on the stage of post-surrealism. It provides a picture of the contemporaneous poets appearing in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise (NRF) and Nyugat. An overview of the texts of the era’s French poets and their reviews in the NRF yields a relatively long list: Paul Éluard, Aragon, Breton, Michel Leiris, Desnos, Henri Michaux, Valéry, and Claudel. The first text to discuss contemporary poetry appeared in the 1 August 1909 issue of the NRF, discussing the issue of the journal Poesia containing Marinetti’s futurist manifesto. In Hungary, however, it was not Benda’s book but the much more radical and deeper essay by Mihaly Babits, one of the key figures of contemporary poetry and the most intellectual of Nyugat’s editors, that evoked controversies in intellectual life.
