Henry J.-M. Levet: diplomatic travel poet

Abstract

ABSTRACT Henry J.-M. Levet’s poetry has been well-known in the Francophone realm for a century, and he is the subject of a recent major biography (Vitoux 2018, L’Express de Bénarès: A la Recherche d’Henry J.-M. Levet. Paris: Fayard). Although he died in 1906, his work (first published in 1921 by La Maison des Amis des Livres) has been in continuous print since 1943 at Gallimard. Levet’s work has been praised and compared to Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue by Valery Larbaud and Léon-Paul Fargue, among many others. This essay argues that Levet’s poems are wonderfully exotic, but that they have a more serious dimension in that they depict travel and the opportunities for diplomacy between cultures that travel affords. Levet, who was a diplomat in addition to a traveller, provides in his ten most famous poems a lesson on how to move between cultures.