W. H. Auden got it dead wrong when he wrote of Paul Claudel in his celebrated “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” of 1939:

Perhaps only the young Auden could have been cheeky enough to patronize two writers immeasurably superior to himself. But in fact, Time has not pardoned Paul Claudel (1868–1955). He remains as peskily unpardonable now as he was in 1939. He represents a standing offence, a jagged stumbling-block, to all right-thinking folk, Catholics as well as “free-thinkers” (libres-penseurs), the term Claudel reserved for his most detested adversaries. Claudel has not been pardoned, nor is he likely to be. He was—and is—a massive, looming, unignorable presence in both French poetry and theater for over sixty years.

When the student rioters of 1968 daubed graffiti on Parisian walls denouncing Claudel, it was graphic testimony to the fact that the poet, a full thirteen years after his death, retained a firm grip even on their uncultivated minds. With hindsight, notwithstanding its deleterious and lingering consequences—still very much with us—the rumpus kicked up by the soixante-huitards now seems as trivial as an insurrection in a flea circus. Their graffiti has long faded away while Claudel, as turbulent and unbudgeable as ever, endures. In a 1903 entry in his Journal, André Gide famously described Claudel as “a congealed cyclone” (un cyclone