Bouts-rimés
Bouts-rimés ( French for “rhymed ends”) are a lyrical small form in which one writes off the cuff according to given end rhymes . The more unusual the rhyming words are put together, the more amazing the execution has to be in order to give the poem at least the semblance of meaningful content. The bouts-rimés (also just bout-rimé , if the poem is meant as such) are considered a salon genre and, in the form of sonnets, were particularly popular as a conversation game during the French Grand Siècle (17th century).
The invention of the bouts-rimés fell to the Menagiana (a literary anthology by Gilles Ménage ) according to the largely unknown and unsuccessful poet Dulot . It is said of him that in 1648 he reported the theft of valuable manuscripts with three hundred sonnets. When asked about the impressively high number, he replied that it was “Sonnets en blanc” (“blank sonnets”), for which he had first determined the rhymes. The story made the rounds in the salons, where the idea of a board game was further developed.
The bouts-rimés became a lyrical fad especially in 1654, when the finance minister Nicolas Fouquet wrote such a rhyming sonnet on the death of his friend Madame du Plessis-Bellière's parrot . It is about the fact that before the bird is forgotten, for example, the public prosecutor is more likely to condemn the legal trick, the card player wants to be muddy, the drunkard stays away from the bottle and the court rules without official dress.
Plutôt le procureur maudira la chicane,
Le joueur de piquet voudra se voir capot,
The buveur altéré s'éloignera du pot
Et tout le parlement jugera sans cassock,
[...]
Fouquet, who surrounded himself with writers and artists in a kind of second royal court, made his casual poetry known and found eager imitators. For several months, a wave of bouts-rimés on the subject of the dead parrot rolled through the French salons and also reached established authors such as François le Métel de Boisrobert , who otherwise dealt with sublime subjects. The interest was so great that the poems actually intended for oral entertainment were printed. One of Charles de Sercy's anthologies alone had eighteen of them. The final point was Jean-François Sarrasin's parodic epic Dulot vaincu ou la Défaite des bouts-rimés , in which a bad poet leads an army of sonnets to its ruin.
Despite their dubious reputation as ultimately artistically worthless salon poetry, the bouts-rimés remained popular and attempts were also made to raise their value above the rank of a gimmick. In 1701, Étienne Mallemans de Messanges published Le Défi des Muses , a collection of serious poems based on given end rhymes that the Duchesse du Maine had given him. Also Alexis Piron , Jean-François Marmontel and Antoine de La Motte Houdar practiced in the genus. Even after the end of the salon culture of the Ancien Régime, which was closely associated with them, the bouts-rimés did not completely lose their charm. In 1864, Alexandre Dumas invited all French poets to prove their talents using given end rhymes, and in the following year published the submissions of 350 authors.
Bouts-rimés poems can also be found outside of France . In Russia they were in literary circles and salons at the beginning of the 19th century. popular. The siblings Dante Gabriel Rossetti , Christina Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti are known for their bouts-rimés sonnets, which they wrote particularly in the years 1848 and 1849. The genre was finally received by authors of the Russian avant-garde such as Mayakovsky or Pasternak in the form of highly reflective metapoetry .
literature
- Alexandre Dumas: Bouts-rimés. Librairie du petit journal, Paris 1865.
- Pierre Jacquin: Bouts rimés . Miot-Dadant, Paris 1880.