text: Work Claudel often referred to Stéphane Mallarmé as his teacher. His poetic has been seen as Mallarmé's, with the addition of the idea of the world as a revelatory religious text. He rejected traditional prosody, developing the verset claudelien, his own form of free verse. It was within the orbit of experimentation by followers of Walt Whitman, impressive for Claudel, of whom Charles Péguy and André Spire were two others working on a form of verset. The influence of the Latin Vulgate has been disputed by Jean Grosjean.
  The best known of his plays are Le Partage de Midi ("The Break of Noon", 1906), L'Annonce faite à Marie ("The Tidings Brought to Mary", 1910) focusing on the themes of sacrifice, oblation and sanctification through the tale of a young medieval French peasant woman who contracts leprosy, and Le Soulier de Satin ("The Satin Slipper", 1931). The last is an exploration of human and divine love and longing, set in the Spanish Empire of the siglo de oro. It was staged at the Comédie-Française in 1943. Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher ("Joan of Arc at the Stake", 1939) was an oratorio with music by Arthur Honegger. The settings of his plays tended to be romantically distant, medieval France or sixteenth-century Spanish South America. He used scenes of passionate, obsessive human love. The complexity, structure and scale of the plays meant that a positive reception of Claudel's drama by audiences was long delayed. His final dramatic work, L'Histoire de Tobie et de Sara, was first produced by Jean Vilar for the Festival d'Avignon in 1947.
  As well as his verse dramas, Claudel also wrote lyric poetry. A major example is the Cinq Grandes Odes (Five Great Odes, 1907).