Entre Virgile et Eliot : le sens des références poétiques de Thomas Bernhard dans Ave Vergil

Ave Vergil, the long poem that T. Bernhard composed between 1959 and 1960, but that he published only in 1981, contains a multitude of references to other poets which, by far, go beyond a simple homage to the author of the Aeneid. This study aims to show that Ave Vergil constitutes a key stage in Bernhard's work insofar as it bears witness to a quest of intellectual guide posts which is performed through a wide range of readings. The authors that Bernhard quotes, even though they embrace poetic positions which contradict one other, can be gathered together according to the conception of reality and nature they present. We find poets who endeavour to express, beyond the chaos of matter, the coherence and stability of the world. These are Virgil, Dante and Guillén, who stand against the poets of incompletion, against Pessimists and Skeptics such as Vallejo, Pascal or Catulle. Pound and Eliot, who are also mentioned, hold a half-way position between these two types for they seek to articulate dialectically a writing of the fragment with the making of an architectural work. The I which in Ave Vergil, expresses his world-weariness in a obsessional way, using images of coldness and death, evokes his unresolved relationship to nature by bringing in the dominant theme of a tension between idyl and "waste land" and between wholeness and fragment. Yet Ave Vergil is not an impasse : it can be seen as the account of readings that a young poet in post-nazi Austria discovers with some amount of delay, like obsessional self-projections which enable him to pass to the higher order of narration as is first outlined in Amras.