In editing his Complete Poems, Gérald Purnelle has obviously followed his heart. With the seventeen collections or booklets – an ensemble increased by numerous pieces of unpublished material – he has brought out from anonymity a poet who deserves his place in the heritage of the francophone literature in the French Speaking Community of Belgium. For Guiette is particularly representative of the country’s men of letters who, through their desire to be recognised by the centripetal and legitimising power Paris exerted over them, in return submitted themselves to its considerable grip. For him, despite his attachment to Symbolism which he tried to reinvent whilst at the same time having difficulties in separating himself from it, this was the case of the nascent Modernism already mentioned earlier and incarnated by Guillaume Apollinaire, a pioneer of the New Spirit. It would also be Surrealism, a literary movement, which would have an impact on him without for all that totally annexing him, even if his audacious metaphors obviously feel the effects of the input of the unconscious.

This convergence of influences confer on Guiette’s poems, from the collection Musiques, dating from 1927 (but written in 1923) to that of Cailloux, appearing in 1973, a brevity and a taste for ellipsis at the limits of hermeticism, itself accentuated by the fact that their author does not necessarily state what it is he is talking about. A demanding form therefore, which, according to the poet Philippe Jones – the author of the present work’s preface – privileges ‘free verse, succinct, sometimes skeletal, not without rhythm, juxtaposed, sometimes without transitions, like moments of automatic understanding, from short line to short line.’ But, he continues, ‘this terracing of notations can create abstruseness concerning understanding […] on rereading the images trigger their beams of light.’ Memorable features to which it is necessary to add, as regards the backcloth, a certain ethical dimension – humanity needs poetry in order to find direction in its existence – and, above all in his final pieces, a deliberately subliminal religious connotation.

For his part the poet Jean Cassou, who in his day added a preface to the volume of Guiette’s poetic oeuvre (Poésie 1922-1967, Paris, Editions universitaires, 1969), wrote about him: ‘It is the poetry of a solitary walker, a daily labourer, a man who is making humanity his profession.’ Which is the reason why we find in his work, both in the poetic prose as in the poetry itself, the whole palette of the emotions and feelings of the human condition. Which, at the whim of the days and their uninterrupted flow, has individuals swinging between certitude and scepticism, asceticism and desire, the cerebral and sensuality, light and shadow. A sign of duality, once again? Doubtless. Which only draws the attentive reader closer to the sensibility of this poet who doubles as a savant, a sensibility which marvellously irrigates the Complete Poems.