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There are not tender poets, lyric poets, tragic poets, there are 
poets, and it is even not necessary to say poets but men among 
men. These only interest us and not the followers of one school 
or another; the little groups keep to their own formulas, become 
opportunists and more and more it seems that anxiety alone can 
give dignity to men. 
Drieu la Rochelle loves his country like a woman; because 
his passion is on the alert, it makes a disturbance, is troubled, 
questions. After all the boring and stupid books on the war and 
the future of the world, he writes “Mesure de la France,” a 
song, at once spontaneously subtle and new. Louis Aragon in 
his nights of Paris in quest of love runs the whole gamut of sen 
suality. He has no taste for those little perversions which today 
are almost the normal, but whether the voluptuous gesture is this 
or that, the cry of the happy, wounded, triumphant, despairing 
flesh rises full of anguish and of beauty. 
All these of whom I have spoken pass in Paris for the mod 
erns. Many try to copy them, seek to discover their formula, to 
use it, to make a school. The latter are dangerous because they 
are boring; perhaps they give a little foundation to what is 
called a reaction. But the word reaction has no precise mean 
ing, it is used as an alibi; one forgets one’s self. Reaction? 
There is bound to be the reaction from one thing to another. 
Then why force the natural play; when literary theories are 
mentioned we should turn our backs. 
RENE CREVEL