Yves Bonnefoy

French poet, essayist, translator, and art historian Yves Bonnefoy was born in 1923 in Tours.

After someearly work that appeared in surrealist reviews, Yves Bonnefoy publishedhis first major book of poetry Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve(On the Motion and Immobility of Douve) in 1953. A dozen works haveappeared, most recently Les Planches courbes (The Curved Planks) in2001.

Bonnefoy´s inquiries into the nature of poetry led to his electionto the Collège de France in 1981. He has translated a number of poets,including Donne, Keats, Leopardi, Yeats, and above all Shakespeare.Bonnefoy has also written a number of prose-poems, or dream-narratives,that seek the origin of poetry in the unconscious and imagine existencefrom a non-conceptual perspective.