  For Sartre, the stance of 19th century novelists who engaged in ‘art for art’s sake’ is not too dissimilar to the problematic way modern poets approach language. In fact, Sartre’s studies on two of the major French poets of the 19th century, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, are tinged with the same disapprobation as his immense study of Flaubert (Sartre 1947b, 1952b, 1971–72). Modern poetry for Sartre is, in the final analysis, a misguided use of language. It uses language as an end in itself, a thing, the same way that a painter uses colour. This ignores the fact that in language the relationship between materiality and signification is the inverse to what is the case in other artistic media. Language is, for the existentialists, the favoured artistic medium because, as the mode of expression that is most directly a medium of signification, it is the one that best reveals a situation as situation in the strong sense, viz., as a part of the world where human freedom is directly engaged metaphysically, ethically and politically. Poets, on the other hand, “are men who refuse to utilise language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a kind of instrument, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true. Nor do they dream of naming the world” (Sartre 1948a, 5). In their use of language, modern poets seem to overlook and act against the main qualities that the existentialists grant it, namely, its representative and communicative powers. This explains why poetry remains at the margins of the existentialist system of the arts, as a literary genre that is not as eminently philosophical and political as the theatre and the novel. The existentialists are, once again, squarely at odds with the surrealists, who condemned the novel and saw in poetry the real artistic medium.