The Blood of a Poet

Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète is one of the authentic classics ‘bi of the cinema, in the small group that includes Caligari, The Ten Days that Shook the World, some René Clair, and some Chaplin. It is perhaps Cocteau’s own magnum opus, even if we compare it with Thomas L’Imposteur, La Machine Infernale, or Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde. And among the works of the ’30’s—a decade fairly arid in poetry and myth—it is one of the few landmarks, like Murder in the Cathedral and Finnegans Wake. I make these simple unanalytic statements of praise, because certain people at present disparage the poet Cocteau as a faker, a master of aesthetic sleight of hand and nothing more, and Le Sang d’un Poète itself as a pretty piece of legerdemain or at best as a myth purely private in its reference. This criticism seems surprising, as Cocteau’s best literary works, by their irony and pathos, and by plots which have the formality of myth, are sufficiently bright and lucid to require no great amount of rational exegesis before coming to understand their meaning and appraising their propriety as poetic constructions; but at first glance Le Sang d’un Poète is slightly more hermetic and appears to stand in need of an interpreter.

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