Albert Camus considered Rene Char the greatest living poet. He spoke of Char as the poet of all times who speaks immediately to his contemporaries because he is in the midst of the fight and formulates both our suffering and our survival. In his poetry Char speaks in the rhythms of Provence, where he was born and spent much of his life. Influenced early on by surrealism, Char found his major themes while fighting as the leader of a resistance group during World War II. The moral crises and physical suffering of that period find concise expression in his aphoristic prose poems.