Abstract

W.H. Auden once remarked that the complete œuvre of Jean Cocteau could fill a warehouse. Over the course of his life, Cocteau produced an impressive range of works, ranging from poems, plays, films, and novels to drawings, sculptures, stained-glass windows, and interior design. His mind was brimful of imagination and wonder, drawing on tropes, themes, and iconography from Greek myth and tragedy to medieval folklore, children’s fairy tales, and the experimental movements of the Interwar Years, while always channelling into his work an idiosyncratic desire to express the beauty of poetic experience. The World of Jean Cocteau: Beautiful, Elusive, Uninhabitable argues, with reference to a comprehensive body of his work and anecdotes of his life, that the world of this great polymath sits on the precipice of something otherworldly. His work and life perpetually elude us, and his individuality points to a desire to strive for something greater, and to inhabit a realm found somewhere between the known and unknown, material and spiritual, finite and infinite.