  With their emphasis on action in situations, the existentialists have an uneasy relationship to poetry. Only Camus, following the example of Nietzsche, wrote a number of poems (in his youth writings and his notebooks, Camus 1933, 1935–1941). In many passages in Camus, poetry has a positive connotation. This connotation, however, refers to a specific quality of language, viz., the use of vivid images that manage to convey some truth about the human condition, rather than to the merits of poetry as a specific literary form.