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In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.

Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

After the first exams, I switched to the Faculty of Philosophy and studied Zoology in Munich and Vienna.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.