History of French poetry

. The Histoire of French poetry constitutes a big part of the French literature since the origins of the language at the time Carolingian until today. The literary history, always in evolution, follows by convenience the succession of the centuries and retains more particularly certain currents artistic and certain creative outstanding works but to the poets were numerous at all the times. In addition, the Poetry French watch a large formal variety and set of themes by traditionally privileging the Art of the worms which was established little by little before being disputed and rejected.

Medieval poetry

Chansons de geste

The gesture or Chanson de geste indicates an account towards ifié (a long poem) in decasyllable S or, more tardily, in Alexandrin S, assonances gathered in Laisse S (long Strophe S of size variable) reporting epopee S legendary heroic putting in scene the warlike exploits kings or of knights, going back to the former centuries. The Gesture , of the Latin gesta , is here to include/understand like “accomplished brilliant deed”.

This type of account appears at the dawn of the French Littérature, towards the end of the 11th century (they are sung between 1050 and 1150). The last were produced during the 15th century. The chansons de geste are characteristic of the medieval Littérature and take the continuation of the great epopees of Antiquity. They are written in Former French. They differ from another great medieval literary kind: the lyric Poetry, whose language this time is the Occitan.

Often anonymous, its author is a Trouvère, which intended it to be sung and accompanied musicalement, in front of a large, popular or noble audience. Some examples: The Song of Roland, XIe century The Crowning of Louis, 1137 approximately Cartage of Nimes Raoul de Cambrai, XIIe century

Courteous poetry

The lyric Poésie S with the Moyen-âge are true Chanson S: their Strophe S corresponds to a musical sentence and a Refrain is always present. Their singing Rythme is defined by the obligatory accompaniment of a melody. The origins of lyric poetry can be required in the popular songs and the Danse S. the influence of the Arab culture is felt also.

Medieval poetry representative of the courteous Littérature reaches its top in the art of the Troubadour S. the Midi, where the economy is developed than in the provinces of the North and where the daily life is less quarrelsome, is made more favourable with the art which sings the love and spring. The influence of this poetry is translated in the Langue of oil during second half of the 12th century.

The poetic kinds are: Weaving song that the ladies sing when they weave and embroider, the Chanson of crusade, the Pastourelle where one sees lords courting shepherdesses, the left play representing a debate on the love. Two topics follow one another it: the Love and the Natural .

More spontaneous and natural at the beginning, in general, poetries evolve to fixed forms: the Ballade, the royal Song, the Rondo, the Virelai. The idea starts to be dissimulated under the Symbole S, the Allégorie, the scholarship, which often come in the place from the Sentiment. As of the end of the 14th century the technical preoccupation with a perfection takes the top and poetry becomes a exercise of Rhétorique or an entertainment of company. Seeking to answer the aristocratic ideal, courteous poetry leads finally to the Maniérisme.

Poetry in XIVe and XVe centuries

Appearance of new lyric kinds: Rondo X, lay S, Virelai S, Ballade S, royal songs.

Principal poets:

The poetry of XVIe century

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry occupies by far the first place with the important role played by the Pleiad, a group of humanistic poets who want to equalize the Latin authors while versifying in French. It brings together seven people: Ronsard, Of Bellay, Jean Dorat (their professor of Greek), Remi Belleau (which replaced, in 1554, Jean of Péruse, deceased), Etienne Jodelle, Pontus de Thyard and Jean Antoine de Baïf.

In 1549 a Manifeste is published, Défense and Illustration of the French language . He proclaims with enthusiasm the Principe S Esthétique S of a group of Humaniste S, the Pleiad. They are new compared to the Moyen-âge: enrichment of the national poetic language by loans with the Dialect S or the ancient and foreign languages or by the creation of new words; imitation of the Old and the Italian ; design of the poet like a Demiurge and poetry like a Art crowned. The Humaniste S of the Pleiad defend the Poésie Latin and want to illustrate it by imitated or borrowed kinds. The Imitation and the loans are conceived at the time like a means of concealing the secrecies from abroad to create a French poetry infinitely more beautiful.

The undeniable chief of this group is Pierre de Ronsard (1524 - 1586). Poet of court, it knows the glory of alive sound. It practices four great forms: the Ode, the Sonnet, the Anthem, the Speech. Its first works are marked by the imitation of the Poète S antiques and Italian, but its imagination and its sensitivity take the top to impregnate them with a personal lyricism. It speaks in praise of the physical beauty and the moral perfection of some female characters, become famous thanks to the evocative power of its images: Cassandre, Marie, Helene. Principal lyric collections: Odes (1550-1552), Loves of Cassandre (1552), Loves of Marie (1555), Sonnets for Helene (1578).

The Poet Joachim of Bellay (1522 - 1560), author of the Proclamation Defense and Illustration of the French language , shown a major and true lyricism. It is translated through some topics: the destroying force of time, the beauty and the glory of the past, nostalgia for its country and the admiration of nature. Sincerity is the feature characteristic of its poetry which Antiquities of Rome and illustrate the Regrets (1558).

Committed poetry

Committed and philosophical poetry, less near to us, holds a notable place however at the time. The religious standpoint in the middle of the conflicts of second half of the century is found in poems with the grave accents, at the same time tragic and epic as in the Anthems (1555-1556), Discours on miseries of this time (1562), or unfinished Franciade (1572), works of Ronsard the catholic partisan or the Tragedies of the combatant protesting Theodore Agrippa of Aubigné (1552-1630).

Other personalities

Poets of less importance also took part in this revival of the poetic expression at the 16th century, to start with Clément Marot (1496-1544) which takes as a starting point the tradition of the Middle Ages before develops a more personal art, fact of lyricism and religiosity. Poems of Maurice Scève (1501? - 1564?) and Louise Labé (1524-1566) sings as for them the feelings in love with much with sensitivity and control of poetic art.

The poetry of the XVIIe century

Poetry baroque

She affirms some common principles: taste of the sensuality, the extremes, the ornamentation, the language for purposes. The poets notable of the age baroque are Theophilus de Viau, Pierre de Marbeuf and Saint-Lover.

Traditional poetry

François Malherbe codifies at the beginning of the century the rules of versification and is greeted by Boileau which shines in the poetry of ideas with its poetic Art or its Satires . A singular work: The Fables of the Fountain Through a minor kind with share and not codified, the Fountain (1621 - 1695) is inspired, like the other traditional ones, in its Fable S, of the Anciens but also of the Folklore French and foreign. He imitates his Masters with a great freedom. Just like the characters of Molière, its characters represent all the social layers. As a moralist the Fountain depicts all the French company of second half of the century. The research of happiness, the man and the capacity are the two expensive topics with the Fountain which one finds in his “ Fables ” (1668 - 1696). The Fable which was before the Fountain, a short kind where the Anecdote hastened towards the Morale, becomes at his place full a Comédie where all is put at its place: the Decoration, characters, the Dialog.

The poetry of the XVIIIe century

If the versified form is used with skill by Voltaire in his Poème on the disaster of Lisbon or in the Society man , poetry, with the common direction of the term, is not released from the influences of the Classicisme and the literary history retains only some names like those of Jacques Delille (1738-1813) ( the Gardens , 1782) or Évariste Parny (1753-1814) ( Élégies , 1784) which prepare the romanticism modestly by cultivating a certain sensitivity to nature and at the time which passes. But it is primarily André Chénier (1762-1794) which makes a success of an expressive poetry as in the famous poem of the Young person Tarentine or that of the Young Prisoner (its work will be published only in 1819, well after its tragic death at the time of the Terreur).

One will mention also Fabre d' Églantine for his songs ( It rains shepherdess ) and his “poetic” participation in the revolutionary calendar.

The poetry of the 19th century

The Romanticism

The Romantisme nourishes all first half of the 19th century and for poetry more precisely the years 1820 - 1850: by convention, poetic Meditations of Lamartine, in 1820, with the Contemplations of Victor Hugo in 1856. This European esthetic movement makes a place very particular to the Lyrisme and the overflowing of ego with a taste marked for the melancholy: the poets thus will express their evil of living and their emotional sufferings by contemplating on death, God, the love and the escape of time, on nature and glory, and beyond these traditional lyric topics on the function of the poet (Hugo) and on a more original perception of fantastic with Nerval, Nodier or Aloysius Bertrand. Beyond the topics not always innovative, the romantic poets will assert an easing of the expression versified in the search of a greater musical quality and some audacities in the words and the images, at Victor Hugo in particular.

This novelty search will be also concretized by " the invention " prose poem by Aloysius Bertrand (1807 - 1841) in Gaspard of the night , published in 1842 after its death, where it inserts to us in an oneiric world, and which initiates a form that will take again later Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

Poetry of the sensitivity and a certain musical quality, the romantic Poésie is liked in rather long poems that the following generation will find heavy, oratorical, talkative and agreed (Rimbaud will speak about " the old form "), with notorious exceptions like Nerval (1808-1855) and its collection of the Dreams (1854); certain poems of this period however constitute parts of reference which still touch the reader of today.

Let us mention principal works of this romantic time marked by an abundant creation:

- Alphonse of Lamartine (1790-1869): the initiator, lyric and religious. Collection: Poetic Meditations (1820) (poems: the lake - the small valley. .) - Poetic Harmonies and Nuns (1830).

- Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) sensitive and moving: the Nights (1835-1837).

- Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863), metaphysics and sinks: the Destinies (1864) (poems: the horn - Brace - the Death of the Wolf - the House of the Shepherd .).

- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) which dominates the century with its multiform poetry, lyric, epic, satirical and committed, social, metaphysical and philosophical… Collections: Eastern the (1829) (poem: the Djinns ) - Sheets of autumn (1831) ( This century was two years old …) - Songs of the Twilight (1835) ( the Sowing ) - interior Voices (1837) ( has Eugene, Viscount H. ) - Rays and the Shades (1840) ( Fonction of the poet - Tristesse of Olympio - Oceano Nox …) - the Punishments (1853) ( O Soldiers of the year two! - To remember the night of the 4 - the atonement : " It snowed… /Waterloo") - Contemplations (1856) ( Tomorrow at dawn … - has Villequier - the Beggar - what the mouth of shade says) - the Legend of the Centuries (1859-1883) ( conscience: Caïn - Booz deadened - the eagle of the helmet - the Poor people). - Gerard de Nerval (1808 - 1855), dense and mysterious: the Dreams (1852) ( El desdichado )

The Parnassus

In reaction against overflowing egocentric person of the Romanticism, a movement is done day which wants to center poetry on the formal work of the poet and develops a theory of " art for art's sake ". This school, heiress of Théophile Gautier, is represented especially by Leconte de Lisle (1818 - 1894) with its ancient Poèmes (1852 - 1874) and its 'cruel Poems (1862 - 1878), and Theodore de Banville (1823 - 1891) ( Odelettes - Odes Funambulesques in 1857 and animation of the review of the contemporary Parnassus).

The influence of this movement with is not neglected: the density and the expressivity will be retained by the following poets and it is besides with Théophile Gautier that Baudelaire will dedicate the Flowers of the Evil and with Theodore de Banville that the young person Rimbaud will write in 1870. The late collection of the Trophées of José-Maria de Heredia in 1893 also testifies to the perenniality of the approach parnassienne, symbolized by the constraining form of the Sonnet.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) is one of the major poets of the 19th century. Associating the formal concern of the short poems (or rather courts) and realism ( carrion - Parisian Tables …) with the expression of an existential anguish shared between the Spleen and the Ideal ( Harmony of the evening - the cracked bell - the Death of the poor , it knew to make a success of a “poetic alchemy” exemplary by extracting the Flowers from the evil in its collection published in 1857 (condemned partially for insult to the moralities) which contains it worms revealing: “You gave me your mud and I made gold of it”. Poet of the real-world and the beauty, happiness and the suffering, morbidity and the sin, it mainly founded the type of the poet tormented and unsuited to the world. Baudelaire also gave to the prose poem its notoriety with its Petits prose poems ( the port - a hemisphere in a hair …).

Poets of the end of the century

- The figures of Verlaine (1844 - 1896) and of Rimbaud (1854 - 1891) prolong the type of the poet cursed by their lives out of the social norms. If Arthur Rimbaud ( One season in hell - Illuminations ) remains like the “robber of fire”, the indicator and the transitory adventurer of poetry with his fulgurances and its revolts, Paul Verlaine, with a longer work, is associated with the musical quality, lyricism melancholic person and a kind of Impressionnisme with its art of the nuance, “Without anything in him which weighs or which poses”. ( Poems saturniens - gallant Festivals - Wisdom …). One can associate Lautréamont to them (1846 - 1870) which leaves unfinished the Songs of Maldoror , blazing prose of revolt against God and the company that the Surrealist ones will discover. - Mallarmé (1842 - 1898) research as for him refinement and sometimes hermetic concision in a rare work ( the Afternoon of a fauna - Poésies , posthumous regrouping) which will influence Paul Valéry.

- Years 1880 see to continue currents with dubious contours like the Décadentisme and the symbolism which in common have the bursting of the poetic form with the free use of the verse and the refusal of prosaicness for the benefit of the suggestion with a taste for refinement and the irrational one. One can quote the names of Jean Moréas, Henri de Régnier, Albert Samain, Georges Rodenbach… Notons also for their imagination Charles Cros and Jules Laforgue, which is sometimes not so far from the songs of Aristide Bruant, itself remote successor of Béranger.

The Poetry of the XXe century

The French poetry of the 20th century is at the same time heiress and innovative in her topics as in its form with a clear predilection for the free Verse, but it seems declining at least or moved in the more dubious field of the song.

Heirs

The beginning of the century shows a great diversity with the heritages of the previous century, which it is about the continuity of the movement Symboliste and decadentist with Sully Prudhomme, Saint-Pol.-Russet-red, Anna de Noailles and certain aspects of Apollinaire, of the line of mental ability and formal work mallarméen with Paul Valéry ( Charmes , 1929), or of the release of the new topics like the humility of the daily newspaper with Francis James ( Géorgiques Christian women , 1912) or Paul Fort ( French Ballades , 1922-1951) and the opening to the modern world with Emile Verhaeren ( sprawling towns , 1895 - All the Flanders , 1904-1911).

In the same years, singular voices are made hear with those which one called " poets of God " like Charles Péguy with his patriotic and religious inspiration and the force of a simple poetry ( Jeanne d' Arc , 1897 - Tapestry of Eve , 1913), or Paul Claudel with its spiritual search expressed through the width of the Verse ( Five Great Odes , 1904 - 1908 - 1910).

Innovators

It is also the time of the " discoverers " like Blaise Cendrars ( Easter in New York , 1912 - the Prose of Trans-Siberian the , 1913), Guillaume Apollinaire ( Alcohols , 1913 - Calligrammes , 1918), Victor Segalen ( Steles , 1912), max Jacob ( the dice cup , 1917), Persian Saint-John ( Praises , 1911 - Anabase , 1924, with a work prolonged in the duration for example Bitter in 1957) or Pierre Reverdy ( Majority of time , 1945, regrouping of the poems of 1915-1922) which explores " the new Spirit " by seeking the presence of modernity and the daily newspaper (the street, the voyage, technique) and the bursting of the form (disappearance of the rhyme, the punctuation, the worms measured and audacities stylistics exploiting the expressivity of the images, the resources of the rate/rhythm and sonorities…). They precede the research more systematized like that of the Dadaïsme of Tristan Tzara and after him of the Surréalisme which entrusts to poetry exploration Inconscient by using disordered states rimbaldiens and by hustling the " sat ". The major poets of this surrealist mobility are André Breton, the theorist of the movement with the Manifeste of Surrealism in 1924, Paul Éluard ( Capitale of the pain , 1926), Louis Aragon ( Perpetual motion , 1925), Robert Desnos ( Corps and goods , 1930), Philippe Soupault ( the magnetic fields , 1920, in collaboration with André Breton) or Benjamin Péret ( the big game , 1928), with which one can associate painters like Dali, Ernst, Magritte or Miro.

Dissidences appear rather quickly in the group in particular in connection with adhesion with the Communisme, and violences of the History as the Occupation of France will lead many poets to renew their inspiration while taking part in the Résistance and to publish committed texts clandestinely. It is the case of Louis Aragon ( the Eyes of Elsa , 1942 - the French Diane , 1944), of Paul Éluard ( Poésie and truth , 1942 - With go German , 1944), of Rene Char ( Feuillets of Hypnos , 1946) or of Rene-Guy Cadou ( Pleine Chest , 1946). The poets will not be saved by the extermination Nazi: Robert Desnos will die in a German camp and max Jacob in the Camp of Drancy.

Individualities

However, of individualities works will produce which will reveal different approaches with the onirism touches with very Jean Cocteau ( Plain-Chant , 1923), the searchs for expressivity of Henri Michaux ( Ailleurs , 1948), the verbal play taken again by Jacques Prévert, poet of the daily newspaper and oppressed ( Paroles , 1946-1949) or by Francis Ponge ( bias of the things , 1942) in the search of a poetry in descriptive prose. All translate emotions and feelings in the celebration of the world with Jules Supervielle ( Oublieuse report , 1948) or Yves Bonnefoy ( Pierre written , 1965), celebration renewed by voices come besides like that from Aimé Césaire, the West-Indian ( Cahier of a return to the native land , 1939 - 1960), of Léopold Sédar Senghor ( Chants of shade , 1945) or of Birago Diop ( Leurres and gleams , 1960) which sings Africa.

The poetry-song

The increasingly massive diffusion of the discs strongly will take part in a new kind, the poetry Chanson which illustrate in the years 1950-70 Boris Vian, Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens or Jacques Brel. The importance of their successors is quite delicate to establish so much they are numerous, with very variable audiences and effects of modes like the folk song, the Rap or the Slam…

The modern time is also marked by various Avant-gardes and of creations of experimental Poésie.

Bonds

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