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Poetry

The manuscript of the poem Sitting of Arthur Rimbaud

Poetry is a literary genre in ancient shapes, usually written to (however, there are prose poems ), in which the importance is given to the dominant form, that is to say, the signifier. Poetry is an art of language that makes maximum use of resources of language. It remains difficult to define, and moreover the definition shifts over time, so that every century he can find a function and an expression that also varies from author to author.

The word "poetry" comes from the Greek (poiein) which means "making, creating" the poet is a creator, an inventor of expressive forms, which also reveal the terms of the Middle Ages , as minstrel and troubadour. The poet, heir to a long oral tradition, which emphasizes musicality, in most poetry, the use to which it brings the density. But the poet also looking expressiveness by the weight given to words such as frequent use of figures of styles and primary images, comparisons and metaphors , popular for their suggestive power.

The poetic expression (expression may be preferable to "poetry" as more generally) has been constantly renewed throughout the centuries with different orientations at different times and individuals. One can distinguish for example the poet conscious artist first formal beauty, the poet " lyric "that cultivates the" song of the soul, "the poet prophet and discoverer of the world" seer "or the poet committed , but without reduce to a designer label simplistic History

Origins

In the ancient Greek any literary expression is called poetic, whether public speaking, singing or theater: any "manufacturer Text" is a poet as expressed etymology. The Greek philosophers seek to refine the definition of poetry and Aristotle in his Poetics identifies three poetic genres: epic poetry, funny poetry and dramatic poetry. Later theorists of aesthetics retain three types: the epic , the lyric and dramatic poetry (including the tragedy as comedy), and use to emerge as the first characteristic of poetry, it apart from the prose , charged with the common expression that we describe as prosaic.

The word poetry will continue to evolve towards a more restrictive sense in applying the texts in which to make a privileged use of rhetorical resources, without prejudging the contents: poetry will be descriptive, narrative and philosophical before making more room for expression feelings.

Indeed, the first literary expression of humanity, using rhythm as an aid to memorization and oral transmission, poetry first appeared in a religious framework and establishing the social myths founders in all cultures with either The Epic of Gilgamesh ( third millennium BC. ) in Mesopotamia, the Vedas , the Ramayana or Mahabharata India , the poetry in ancient Egypt the Bible of the Hebrews or the Iliad and the Odyssey Greeks, the Aeneid in Latin.

Between Apollo and Dionysus

Apollo, Poetry and Music, Opera Garnier , sculpture in bronze and gold leaf of Aim Millet

Poetry was marked by orality and musicality from the outset because the pursuit of particular rhythms, such as use of to , and sound effects, such as rhymes , had a function mnemonic for the oral transmission primitive. This invoice specific poetic text that it is primarily intended to be heard rather tackled by the silent reading.

Under the auspices of Orpheus and Apollo musagte, god of beauty and art, and associated with the Muse Erato , music and poetry are closely linked by the search for the harmony and beauty, by the Charming in every sense of magic song. Poetic creation, however, constantly hesitate between order and calm Apollonian (explicit Euripides Alcestis in: "This is wild, full of chaos and strife, the lyre of Apollo softens and soothes) and "fury Dionysian "which refers to the god of ecstasy, mysteries, disordered and rhythms of the natural forces that we discover for example in the Dithyramb of Greek antiquity.

Technique

Main article: Poetic Function.

In linguistics, poetry is described as a statement focused on the shape of the message so that the poetic function is dominant. In the prose is important is the "signified", it has a purpose "outside" (the transmission of information) and is defined as a step forward that can symbolize an arrow and shows that the Latin root word meaning " forward ". But for poetry, the importance is oriented towards the "form" to mean, in a process "reflexive", symbolized by the "worms" that shows an increase in the recovery with the principle of backward ( the worms 'backward') that can be represented by a spiral.

Poetry does not define specific topics but by the care given to the major means to that multiplies the signified: the enrichment of linguistic material takes into account all the effects work on the formal aspects that the weight of words going well beyond the plain meaning of the word "poetry" which simply refers to the harmonious beauty associated with a certain sentimentality. The poetic expression, however, offers the course of history varied according to the guidelines adopted by the dominant poet.

Verse

The layout of the poetic text is traditionally based on the principle of return and the increase in the recovery that appears to use (regular or not), although there are mestizo forms as prose poem or poetic prose that reflect the characteristics of the poetic text (hence their names) as the use of images and sounds or search for particular rhythms. These worms are often grouped into stanzas and sometimes organized in fixed form poems as the sonnet or ballad.

Uses metered poetry verses defined by the number of syllables as the Alexandrian French, while poetry punctuated plays on the length of the feet (and their number) as in the hexameter dactylic Greek and Latin, or the square accents as in the pentameter iambic English. The haiku (or haiku) of Japan, which has acquired international distribution, is traditionally used three to five, seven and five syllables. Modern poets are released gradually from these rules: for example the French poets introduce in the second half of the nineteenth century free verse and the verse , and also calls into question the classical conventions of rhyme which goes largely to twentieth century. Graphic tests were tempted more marginal example by Mallarme ( A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance ), Apollinaire ( Calligrammes ) or Pierre Reverdy , seeking to speak to the eye and not just in the ear, pulling and the poem on the side of the table.

Musicality

The origin of oral poetry and song evoked the lyre of Orpheus or Apollo brand flute poetic expression that is concerned with the account of the rhythms of the syllables (peer to / from odd, "silent e" ... ) and play accents and breaks ( hyphenation , crossover ...). Poetry also operates the sound especially with the rhyme (back of the same sounds at the end of at least two verses with the last vowel based tonic) and combinations of gender (masculine or feminine rhymes), disposition (rhymes followed cross or kissed) and wealth (rhymes flat enough or rich). It also uses the collection of sounds in one or more worms ( alliteration and assonance ), the game's chorus (as in the ballad or the Pont Mirabeau of Apollinaire ) or correspondence between sound and meaning with imitative harmonies (eg famous "Who are these snakes ..." Racine) or semantic rhymes (Fall / monotonous).

The weight of words

Portrait of Mallarm by douard Manet

The poet uses all the resources of language as meaningful words by their rarity and limited: sometimes called "poetry-Telegram" where every word "cost" as the sonnet and its 14 to or in the extreme brevity the haiku of Japanese three verses, even the monostiche a single verse. The enrichment also involves the search for meaning rare and neologisms (eg "incantation" in The Trees of Apollinaire , who "serious magicians / / Incantent the sky when it thunders," or "dawn" associated with setting suns by Verlaine ), for the connotations as the inspiration behind the female figure in the footsteps of Paul Valry ("Pure one, divine shadow, / How sweet, your not selected!") or by lexical networks woven into the poem as the religious harmony in the evening of Baudelaire. The poet has other resources like the place still in verse or in the poem ("green hollow" in the first line of the sleeper in the valley of Rimbaud which meet the "two red holes on the right side" of the last lines) or correspondence with the rhythm and sounds ("The hitch was sweating, panting, was made. ..." The Fountain , The Coach and the Fly) ...

The poet is also the development of words by figures of speech figures as insistently as the accumulation, parallelism or anaphora (eg "Since the fair is in the abyss, / Since give the scepter to the crime, / Since all rights are betrayed, / Since the proudest remain bleak, / Since view at street corners / The disgrace of my country ... ", Victor Hugo , the punishment , II, 5) , figures as opposed to the chiasm or the oxymoron ("the black sun of Melancholy" Gerard de Nerval ), breach of construction as the ellipse or anacoluthon ("Exiled on earth amongst the shouting, / His giant wings prevent him from walking, " Baudelaire 's Albatross ) and of course the figures of substitution as the comparison and metaphor (from Ronsard and Du Bellay to Jacques Prvert or Eugene Guillevic through Hugo , Apollinaire , the surrealists and others). The use of the image is also identified as a hallmark of poetic expression, one emblematic example of metaphor will report: "(Ruth was wondering ...) What God, what a harvester of eternal summer / Was in so carelessly thrown / That golden sickle in the field of stars "( Victor Hugo , Boaz asleep).

Genres and Currents

Pierre de Ronsard , painting from the School of Blois - XVI century

The definition of poetic genres has always been discussed by discussing formal criteria and / or content criteria (object) and, moreover, modern poetry by breaking the traditional genres (lyric poetry, epic, committed, spiritual, narrative, descriptive ...) and becoming a totalizing expression and free makes it even more difficult to categorize.

However, without shut himself in too legalistic terminology, we can observe the "dominant" key poetic expression ( Roman Jakobson defining dominant as "the focal element of a work of art" who governs, and determines transforms the other elements (see Antoine Compagnon ). The opposition is easiest between orientation (orientation "aesthetic") and an orientation toward the content (orientation "semantics"), obviously without excluding the other since the one hand there is meaning from words and there, on the other hand, there is no formal expressiveness that there would not be writing poetry. This latter approach is multifaceted and complex, sometimes also called "ontological" (for Olivier Salzar ), because returning "in the sense of being simultaneously considered as being general, abstract, essential and as being singular, concrete, existential" (TCF). His vast field can in turn be subdivided into three dominant (defined by the model of the sign presented by Karl Bhler: "The sign functions as such by his relationship with the transmitter, receiver and referent" . These three dominant, again not exclusive, are the dominant "expressive" or "emotional" or opera in the narrow sense, I turned to the poet, the dominant "conative" facing the recipient that the poet wants to reach touching his conscience and his sensitivity as in poetry and moral commitment, and function "referential" facing an "object" external to the song in the world of sense perceptions, emotional or cultural celebration or as in poetry epic poet makes significant excess of myths.

But this division is only lighting: poetry, more than any other genre, these approaches suffers from the "learned" when it is first encounter between the man who, by his words, he said and his world, and he who receives and shares this unveiling. Witness, for example, an unclassifiable work as the Chants de Maldoror by Lautreamont.

The poet artist

Portrait of Jose-Maria de Heredia by Emile Levy

The concern for form is of course constant in poets and prosodic rules are worked slowly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (consider the "silent e" diaeresis / syneresis , hyphenation , pure rhymes ...) - with Parnassus. This emphasis on the poetic work through the Great rhetoricians of the late fifteenth century and the Pleiades and the classics ("Beauty, I'm worry" says Francois de Malherbe ), before reappearing in the nineteenth century in response to outbursts and the facilities of poetry romantic. Theorists and practitioners of art for art , sharing the belief that "art lives of constraints and dies from freedom," as the say in the next century Paul Valery , defend the traditional rules (to syllabic rhymes, poems Fixed-form as the sonnet) with Theophile Gautier or Parnassiens as Theodore de Banville , Leconte de Lisle or Jose-Maria de Heredia. The design aesthetic will even Mallarme to some hermetic seeking to "give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe" and challenges formal (as in the sonnet -ixe/-yx of Mallarme , the Calligrammes d ' Apollinaire ...) that systematize the mid-twentieth century games of the Oulipo and Raymond Queneau (A hundred thousand billion poems), Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud.

It may also, beyond the apparent paradox, link to this poetic current emphasis on "form", the steps of Henri Michaux , including Le Grand Combat (Who I was?, 1927 ) is written in a language invented made sound suggestions, or experimentation "lettrists" of Isidore Isou. Impasses of this poetry of the soul cut and sometimes rhetoric will be fought regularly on behalf of the flexibility and power of suggestion, for example by Paul Verlaine and poets symbolist or decadentists the late nineteenth century, will claim a less corseted poetry. This conception of an art freed from the constraints prevail largely in the twentieth century when poetry becomes a totalizing expression, beyond matters of form.

The Poet "lyric"

Portrait of Alphonse de Lamartine by Henri Decaisne

If the word "poetry" has its meaning in everyday sense of harmony and sentimental, it is the importance of lyric poetry as it should. This one, directed towards the ego of the poet, owes its name to the lyre , which belonged to Orpheus and Apollo, and which in ancient times, accompanied the songs that did not distinguish poetry but then must not be confined to small personal music of the poet singing a traditional themes and poetic priori as love, death, loneliness, angst, nature or daydream. Indeed, poetry was able to enter modernity in the poetic field including its most surprising or most prosaic ("A carrion" in Baudelaire , in the industrial city Verhaeren and trivial daily at Verlaine in these verses of Kythira , in gallantry Celebrations, "Love fills everything except / Hunger, sorbets and jams / We maintain body aches ..."). In fact the variety of voices is extreme, but with the mainstream at different times, such as romanticism and symbolism in the nineteenth century or the surrealism in the twentieth century.

The forms themselves also evolve through example of the long romantic poem (At Villequier of Victor Hugo or Nights of Alfred de Musset ) in regular sonnet Baudelaire and the Symbolists free form and expression of the unconscious with gushing the Surrealists before the spontaneity of the oral expression of Jacques Prvert in lyrics , for example.

The lyric poet is for the privileged channel of expression of its sensitivity and its subjectivity symbolized by the Pelican (May Night) of Alfred de Musset. But this poem goes beyond the confidence to express the human condition and Hugo proclaims in the preface of Contemplations : "When I talk about myself, I'm talking about you! . This "song of the soul", the key area of "I", which adheres to the recipient, however, is opposed to the objective or descriptive poetry and rhetoric Parnassiens narrative poetry or the novels of medieval epic and which deals with heroic and mythical themes with rhythm and color or ideas to poetry ( Lucretius , Ovid , Voltaire ) for which the poetic form is not the primary concern.

The Poet "hadjin"

The poet hadjin is also known as haiku. This term is used to define one who wrote a haiku : a short Japanese poem. In the sixteenth century, poets in Japan were used for the first time, word games and have dealt with things in everyday life that the ancient poetry (renga ") does not care. So called Japanese haiku poets have begun to present their products as independent poems, which is the origin of haiku. Matsuo Basho (1644 - 1694) is known as the first great poet in the history of haiku.

"The autumn wind

Whiter

That the stones of the rocky hill "

(Basho)

Basho has tried to show the weakness of men and the greatness of Destiny. He highlighted the absurdity of human activity. Koi Nagata (1900 - 1997), another Japanese hadjin, also emphasized the fun aspect of things to think about the essence of the world.

"A firefly

Enlighten

Another dead firefly "

(Nagata Koi)

Haiku is a poetic style currently adopted in the entire world culture. Such a poem is always a moment of astonishment, high sensitivity, but the inspiration and motivation are diverse and sometimes the old rules are abolished.

The shadow of the summer on the wall

On Mill

The sour cherry sings

( Botarro )

The poet prophet, discoverer of the world

Rimbaud Carjat by Etienne (1872)

The art of poetry is also traditionally associated with the "gift of poetry," that is to say, a quasi-divine inspiration of the poet, in connection with the Muses and the sacred, who has the role of decoder the invisible. This is the conception of antiquity represented by Plato has Socrates say that (in Ion) about poets: "They speak in fact, not by art, but a divine power." In the sixteenth century, the Pleiades will take this perspective and Ronsard wrote these lines in his Ode to Autumn: "Inspired by the soul in a gift of poetry, / That God has granted to the restless mind / The poignant stings of his divinity. / When the man is hit, he becomes a prophet ") and in this vein as the Romantic poets and register them after Baudelaire and Symbolist poets. This particular function of the poet found a supporter copy with Arthur Rimbaud, who in his famous letter to Paul Demeny asked the poet to be "seer by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses" and being "truly the thief of fire "and find" something new - ideas and forms ", also citing" the alchemy of the verb "to be the instrument of the poet-discoverer.

After the First World War and after Apollinaire , also advocate a "new spirit", the surreal, the heirs of that enthusiasm Rimbaud, to entrust the care of poetic image than reality, and open "magnetic fields" innovative uncovering the unconscious, what will make Louis Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris, speaking of "the inordinate use of narcotic and loving image."

In the years 1950-1970, returning to the systematization of the image, the poets move more towards a poetry-celebration, a song in the world to an Orphic or lyric poetry, song of the soul that gives voice personal poets like Jules Supervielle , Rene Char and Yves Bonnefoy.

The poet committed

Portrait of Victor Hugo by Leon Bonnat (1879)

However, some Romantics and especially Victor Hugo, the poet will go into the city by giving it a guiding role for the people. Prophet, he becomes the Messiah as outlined in the famous poet's function ( the Rays and Shadows , 1840) which defines the poet Victor Hugo as "the holy dreamer," chosen of God "who speaks to his soul" became the bearer of light and vision "of future times piercing the shadows." Committed poetry of punishment, both epic and satirical , will be the next step for Victor Hugo that arise as opposed to "the little Napoleon." Jehan Rictus with his poetry reflects the unique life of the poor at the end nineteenth century, in contrast with the naturalism of Zola distanced.

The religious commitments (from Charles Peguy , for example), or ideological end up in the twentieth century as a distant legacy of Ronsard (Speech) or Agrippa d'Aubign with Louis Aragon , poet of communism (Hooray Ural, 1934) , Paul Claudel , Petain in 1941 (the Marshal lyrics) and Paul Eluard (Ode to Stalin, 1950) or Jacques Prevert and positions in Words anarchist (1946-1949).

The poets of Negritude, Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor in particular, for their part represent a particular branch of the French poetry of the twentieth century, whose commitment and ideas conveyed very strong, are still quite sensitive in France. The first is the champion of the West Indies, having the desire to "plunge into the truth of being" , haunted by the question of uprooting the descendants of slaves ( Notebook of a return home ). The second created a poetry of universal hope that the motto, the use of French and positive references to French culture mixed with historical subjects that animates African (Chaka). It should be added with and as a result of these two great poets nigga * African, other black poets like Leon Gontran Damascus member of the Negritude movement, David Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara ... have their poetry at the service of the liberation of the black man in general, and the independence of the African continent in particular.

With Honour poets , some poets participating in the Resistance by publishing important works clandestinely. This is the case of Louis Aragon (Les Yeux d'Elsa, 1942; The Diane French, 1944), Paul Eluard (Poetry and Truth, 1942; the appointment German, 1944), Ren Char (Sheets of Hypnos, 1946) or Rene Guy Cadou (Full Chest, 1946). The poets will also not spared by the Nazi extermination: Robert Desnos died in a German camp and Max Jacob in the Drancy camp. More recently, singers like Leo Ferr and Jean Ferrat , in the tradition of surrealist poets have sung their commitment.

The avant-garde poetry

Another form of engagement is emerging in the twentieth century, protest poetry, both politically and linguistically. This momentum, synthesized under the name of avant-garde , was born with the Futurists Italian and Russian movement Dada. He relied on the information of the link between politics and language and developed under various forms until today. The avant-garde poetry have evolved to a progressive abandonment to rhymed and measured, and the formal dimension. It started with free verse standard surrealism and raced in the 1960s with a complete demolition, eg in Denis Roche .

. Also known simply as "text" or "poetic document" . One can find many examples in countless magazines poetry that continue to flourish, despite a very favorable environment for their expression. Among these, mention may, for their openness and for their longevity, Verso (since 1977) or Join (since 1962).

Poetry has become in modern times, a sophisticated art as elitist or too difficult to read, cut off from the real world . Yet poetry is widely practiced as evidenced by blogs and many readings and festivals devoted to it, but its distribution in bookstores is increasingly rare, despite a multitude of tiny publishing houses (see Edit Poetry in France ). It is not present in either the TV and you do not choose more poets to represent the literature in France. Poetry lost its audience because it has little significance economically.

Some contemporary efforts, under the influence of dub poetry including American, are indeed reflected more with the support of music in the popular genre of poetry-song with, for example, rap (which does not claim as poetry) and especially slam that drift. The slam is an oral poetry and has no artistic intent. It is democratic in the sense that it assumes that "virtually everyone is a poet . "It is nonetheless moved the audience with words. It is an art of improvisation and thus regain the lost medieval tradition of tenson of troubadours who was nevertheless a kind of learned poetry. Slam brings back the rhyme but in a minimal state .

Jacques Roubaud finally distinguishes a category of poetry he called "Zoom-Zoom" and consists of performances that give the name of poetry, but do not necessarily appeal to language. The model invoked is the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters is rather that the music really.

In poetry, much remains the awareness of creativity and beauty of language , beginning with a language known and heard, but also read in words and pages. For lovers of poetry, "In the beginning was the Word" and its creative power that feeds the memory and "turns night into light" .

Some attempts uncertain attempt to explore the potential of the web by creating "hyperpomes" minimalist: we give an example of the Galant Le Merle (2010)

References

  1. This article discusses general concepts, but intended for French readers, he will take up references in the poetry of the French language.
  2. Antoine Compagnon
  3. by Olivier Salzar
  4. Jakobson
  5. "plunge into the truth of Being"
  6. a , b , c and d Roubaud, 2010
  7. Stubbornness of poetry - Jacques Roubaud , Le Monde diplomatique , January 2010
  8. Roubaud 2010, p. 23
  9. Roubaud (2010) compares the slam to a composition of elementary school
  10. Like the fact that Jean-Luc Godard to his hero who comes to fight against a dehumanized world run by a computer in Alphaville
  11. http://fragmentsnoirssurfondblanc.blogs.nouvelobs.com/archive/2010/09/10/premier-hyperpoeme-de-l-hyperhistoire-avec-que-des-liens-hyp.html

Notes

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