Robert Vivier

Robert Vivier (1894–1989) was a Belgian poet, novelist, essayist, biographer and literary critic who wrote in French.

He published his first poetry collection, Le Menetrier, in 1924, which was followed by Dechirures (1927), and S'étonner d'être (1977). His anxious listening to everyday life, his nostalgia for the childhood of the world, his meditations on the "glory of life" and the "very sweet eternity that breathes the world" are expressed in free verses or very classical verses (sometimes sonnets), whose cuts he redistributes according to very personal musical laws. According to the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics his poetry is characterised by "discreet interrogation". It is described by Jean-Luc Wauthier as displaying "acute and sensuous surreality" and being "deceptively transparent, streaked with paradoxically calm anxiety". A later novel is Avec les hommes, set during the First World War.

Vivier's nonfiction works include biographies of Louis Antoine, the founder of Antoinism, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the artist . His critical works include Et la poésie fut langage (1954) on La Chanson de Roland, Villon, Racine, Verlaine and Mallarmé, and Frères du Ciel (1962) on poetic interpretations of the Icarus and Phaethon myths.

He held professorships in literature at the University of Liège and the Sorbonne,