Francis Ponge has been called the poet of things because simple objects like a plant, a shell, a cigarette,

a pebble, or a piece of soap are the subjects of his prose poems. For Ponge, all objects yearn to express themselves, and they mutely await the coming of the word so that they may reveal the hidden depths of their being, as Richard Stamelman explained it in Books Abroad. David Gascoyne, a contributor to Reference Guide to World Literature, declared: To transmute commonplace objects by a process of replacing inattention with contemplation was Ponges way of heeding Ezra Pounds edict: Make it new. His ever-renewed attempts to celebrate objects of everyday experience in a language enlightened by puns and complex words, with onomatopoeia, and the calligrammatic, were not a restless search for novelty but rather a way of transcending modernity and restoring a Wordsworthian appreciation of the simple things in life: slate, the Seine, asparagus, and tables. What has an imperious fascination for [Ponge], observed Betty Miller of the late poet, is the essence of the interior life of the plant or shell, so that we feel in reading him almost as though it were the plant which spoke to express miraculously, without human intervention, its personality. Robert Bly noted in the Georgia Review that Ponges prose poems also exposed the hidden relationship between the inner life of human beings and the world of objects. It is as if, Bly wrote, the object itself, a stump or an orange, has links with the human psyche, and the unconscious provides material it would not give if asked directly. The unconscious passes into the object and returns. Gascoyne called Ponge An epicurean of language, yet one who resisted all accusations of elitism. He addressed himself to the common reader in the hope of persuading us that poetry is not merely a preoccupation of the idle and overeducated. Throughout his forty-five year writing career, Ponge was faithful to his unique approach to poetic subject. Speaking of the poets collected works, Sarah N. Lawall in Contemporary Literature found that what Ponge has to say remains quite consistent, and his collected works juxtapose texts from 1921 to 1967 without any contradiction whatsoever. He still goes to the mute world of things for his peculiar dialectic, and he still celebrates the creative power of speech. Lawall found, too, that Ponges work served as an example of systematically individual perception and expression in a world threatened by group morality and intellectual totalitarianism. Perhaps the most obsessive example of Ponges approach is to be found in his collection Le Savon, translated as Soap. In this collection, each prose poem considers a different aspect of the life of a bar of soap, detailing each one from the soaps perspective. When used for washing, the soap becomes sudsy with joyous exuberance; when left alone, it grows hard, dry and cracked. In addition, Ponge makes clear to the reader that their shared experience in the text has been nothing more than a linguistic experience having nothing to do with the object ostensibly being discussed. As Lawall explained, Ponge develops a series of comparisons to show how the readers pleasure has come from his sense of playing a game, that the extreme form of this game is poetry, the purely verbal game which neither imitates nor represents life, and that words and figures of speech resemble other human concoctions like bread, soap, and electricity. Other critics also noted this close relationship between Ponges poems and the objects they discuss. Michael Benedikt, writing in The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, concluded that Ponges poems are as objective as objects in the world themselves. Robert W. Greene, in his book Six French Poets of Our Time: A Critical and Historical Study, argued that in many of his poems, Ponge tries to create a verbal machine that will have as much local intricacy as its counterpart in the world of objects. Stamelman went even further in analyzing this relationship. In Ponges poetry, he wrote, the text refers to itself and to itself alone The only thing the text represents is its own surging into being through language, its own act of expression. Ultimately, the text signifies itself. Ponges prose poems follow no set formula. They develop instead in a seemingly spontaneous manner, following a meandering path to their completion. Ponge may be the first poet, James

Merrill wrote in the New York Review of Books, ever to expose so openly the machinery of a poem, to present his revisions, blind alleys, critical asides, and accidental felicities as part of a text perfected, as it were, without finish. Greene acknowledged that Ponges texts hardly conform to most conceptions of what poems, even prose poems, are or should be. They contain puns, false starts, repetitions, agendas, recapitulations, syllogistic overtones, a heavy ideological content, and other features that one normally associates with proseand the prose of argumentation at thatrather than with poetry. As Bly concluded that Ponge doesnt try to be cool, distant, or objective, nor does he let the object speak for itself. His poems are funny, his vocabulary immense, his personality full of quirks, and yet the poem remains somewhere in the place where the senses join the object. Benedikt noted that, with Michaux, Ponge is regarded as one of the most significant mid-century French poets. Ponge spent the last thirty years of his life as a recluse at his country home, Mas des Vergers. He suffered from frequent bouts with nervous exhaustion and numerous psychosomatic illnesses. He continued to write, however, and the work he was involved with at the time of his death was published posthumously in 1981. Entitled La Table, it reflects what was Ponges undying, and increasingly obsessional, quest for le mot juste, mused Gascoyne. Its final sentence reads: O Table, ma console et ma consolatrice, table qui me console, ou je me consolide. For Ponge, his final subject was his writing table, which had in fact by then become his entire world.