Robert Guiette then began a journey which led him first of all to the Royal Library as a trainee then to working as a Professor at the University of Gent, with full Professor status from 1937, a position to which was added the French courses he gave between 1944 and 1946 at the Antwerp Higher Institute of Commerce. And he essentially owed his election to the Royal Academy of Belgian French Language and Literature, on January 9, 1954, to his scholarly publications and other critical studies of Medieval texts, as well as the translations of writings in Middle Dutch of which he was the scrupulous author.

A philologist who was distinguished early on by his peers, Guiette was also an acknowledged poet who was not insensitive to Modernism. During his stay in the City of Light he in effect came into contact with André Salmon and Pierre-Jean Jouve, but above all Blaise Cendrars and Max Jacob. The latter two would have a vital influence on his coarse fledgling talent, still completely impregnated with a Symbolism in which Emile Verhaeren had pride of place: his poems entitled ‘Masque’ bear the stamp of the former, to whom he nursed a fervent admiration and in whom he saw ‘the most fertile of storytellers’; to the latter, regarding whom he wondered ‘will history recognise everything that the poetry of his century owes to him?’, he devoted a biography entitled A Life of Max Jacob, partially published in 1934 and published in full some weeks before his death on November 8, 1976.

Another poet, who also went by the name Max, would have a profound impact: the Antwerp born Elskamp, the bard of the working class life of maritime Flanders, and part of whose correspondence he would make known as well a selection of poems, which were published in 1955 in Pierre Seghers’s collection ‘Poètes d'aujourd'hui,’ preceded by a judicious analysis. In it we can see an obvious sign of the interest which, beyond that which he had for ancient literature, he constantly showed for the writings of his compatriots. His anthology Poètes français de Belgique. De Verhaeren au surréalisme (1948) bears witness to this, a work now sadly out of print, as well as the articles appearing in various journals in which can be detected his preferences in terms of poetry: Jean de Bosschère, Henri Michaux, Odilon-Jean Périer. A trio to which it is necessary to add Franz Hellens, whom company Guiette kept for a time within the editorial committee of the avant-garde journal Le Disque vert. 

‘A man exiled from himself’

As for his own poetry, it is possible to grasp certain of its fundamentals by the way he himself presents it, in a confessional not without its elevated points of perspective: ‘For this poet only Solitude and Inner Life count. Everything is simplicity to the person who has no wish to be foolish. Few words, but short, incisive, acid. The scream in which the whole being extends, conscious-unconscious, the flesh and the body. Density, he believes, does not exclude emotion.’ An introspection which continues in these terms: ‘Above all else the internal world absorbs him. Thus he does not hide his taste for the secret of a secluded existence.’ Finally, in another note he defines himself thus: ‘a man exiled from himself.’