The Shadows That Shape Us: Delving into the Poetic Philosophy of Jean Follain
Jean Follain (1903–1971), though known amongst a select few literary circles in France and beyond, remains one of the lesser-illuminated figures on the twentieth-century poetic firmament. Jurist by profession and poet by latent necessity, the voices in Follain’s verse come not to reveal, but to half-utter, to suggest through silence, absence, and fragments. His output resists the grandiose gestures of larger names, yet what he offers is something rarer still: a world where the lyric is quietly temporal, haunted by the material simplicity of human living.
Born in Canisy, Normandy, and trained in law in Paris, Follain’s professional life was steeped in juridical practice. Yet, like Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, he managed to interweave the logical precision of law with poetic density, eschewing romantic outbursts in favor of a more grounded attentiveness. A participant nonetheless in pre-war Montparnasse, his friendships with Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and André Salmon placed him in proximity to Surrealism, though he himself pursued a trajectory much less flamboyant—almost ascetic. His volumes—such as “Exister” (1947), “Territoires” (1953), and “Usage du temps” (1961)—constitute a cartography of the ordinary, little towns where nothing happens, and yet where everything pulses beneath stone and ash.
At its heart, Follain’s verse is a confrontation with time and death. As he writes in “Exister”: “le pain n’est qu’un instant sous la dent puis une absence / le vent efface au sable doux les pas d’une fillette” (“bread is only a moment under the tooth then an absence / the wind erases in soft sand the steps of a young girl”).¹ Note how the poem’s lexical economy wrests an entire metaphysical arc from the humble act of eating: existence as fleeting consumption, memory dissolving under nature’s slow erasure. Here, matter speaks against permanence, and memory is not a triumphant archive but a vanishing trace.
His tone often evokes the still-lifes (natures mortes) he viewed in both art and life—modes of suspension. The act of seeing becomes a way of resisting oblivion. In “Usage du temps” he sketches out the articulation between man and landscape with unnerving clarity: “un homme jeune passe / tenant une fleur bleue” (“a young man passes / holding a blue flower”).² It is the most ephemeral of gestures, and yet for Follain, the gesture holds a sacred density. The flower is not merely romantic residue; it becomes a cipher of ‘being-in-the-world,’ a declaration of subjectivity in the face of time’s slow erosion.
One may ask: how is this helpful, in a world saturated with images, propaganda, the roar of collective sentiment? The answer lies precisely where Follain leaves his own: in the minute attentions. To read Follain is to slow one’s perceptions, to notice the granularity of impression, the visible disintegration of phenomena. In an age that thirsts for synthesis and slogans, Follain remains that rare poet of the half-worlds—the ones we pass without recognition, but in which life begins.
In one of his more piercing fragments, from “Appareil de la terre” (1964), he writes: “des voix très lentes / disaient mourir mieux qu’on ne vit” (“very slow voices / said to die better than we live”).³ Skeptics could accuse these lines of defeatism, and yet such a reading would dismiss the precision Follain achieves: the problem is not death, but life undervalued. It’s a declaration wholly counter to the consumerist imperatives of his time (and ours), in which delay is sin, and acceleration virtue. In dying “better,” a more lucid consciousness appears—one alert, perhaps finally, to the brevity and consequence of living.
**
Let us now go further—retreat into story, or perhaps into allegory.
Once, in a mountain city of uncertain name, a man governed dreams with absolute fidelity. Each morning, he awoke, noted the dimensions of each image, categorized the shadows, examined the silences between words spoken. His house was modest—one mirror, one cup, one cedar wood drawer with thirty-two pamphlets. He ate cheese and looked long at birds without naming them.
One day he found a girl asleep beside the postal steps. Her breathing timed to the wind, she murmured of villages with burials where bells were silent, not out of respect, but of absence. He offered no questions. Instead, he wrote down a phrase he had long held in the chambers of his mind, perhaps once read in a thin book from Normandy: “L’homme au col noir / porta le pain au soldat / sans dire un mot.” (“The man in the dark collar / brought bread to the soldier / without saying a word.”)⁴
He spoke it aloud to the sleeping girl. She did not stir, but the trees bent a little, as if to hear.
And what of that line?
It is neither dramatic nor grand. The man is unnamed, his coat undetailed, his pain unspoken. The soldier—a synecdoche for history—simply receives. No revolution, no heroics. Yet in the quiet act of bread-giving, the poem stages a metaphysical resistance. Silence here is not consent but intensification. The universe, Follain seems to say, is shaped not by declarations, but by bread offered with no words.
**
We must cherish voices like Follain’s not despite their refusal of spectacle, but because of it. His poetry refuses the violence of certainty. His is a lyricism attentive to limits, to finitude, to the shadows shaped not by darkness, but by light.
For those who feel exiled from the harsh clarity of ideological verse, Jean Follain’s poems are pathways—austere, yes, but beneath it, full of erosions so delicate they request the entirety of your quiet. In the words of poet André du Bouchet, “Follain does not explain reality. He surrounds it.”⁵
And perhaps that is all we need.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, stillness, poetic-realism
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¹ Jean Follain, *Exister* (Gallimard, 1947), p. 18.
² Jean Follain, *Usage du temps* (Gallimard, 1961), p. 42.
³ Jean Follain, *Appareil de la terre* (Gallimard, 1964), p. 33.
⁴ Follain, as quoted in Claude Roy, “Jean Follain ou la patience du regard,” *NRF*, No. 229, 1972.
⁵ André du Bouchet, “Note sur Jean Follain,” *Poésie*, August 1975.