Verse libre
As vers libre ( French "free verse") which are metrically free verse forms in the French poetry of the symbolist tradition called from the end of the 19th century.
It is to be distinguished from the metrically free but rhymed verse forms of the 17th and 18th centuries, also known as vers libres classiques , which are better known as vers mêlés .
It differs from the vers libéré ("liberated verse"), which can be understood as a preliminary stage of the vers libre , in the consistent rejection of all tradition, which was only slightly softened in the vers libéré . Formally, it differs little from the German free rhythms in the successor to Klopstock , if one disregards the echoes of antique meter measures that can be traced in the free rhythms up to the modern age, but originates from a different line of tradition.
The programmatic justification can be dated to the year 1886 when, in the magazine La Vogue published by Gustave Kahn , the poems Marine and Mouvement by Arthur Rimbaud , translations of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass by Jules Laforgue , Kahn's cycle of poems Intermède (which later also became part of Les palais nomades appeared) as well as ten poems by Laforgue and other examples of free rhythmic poetry by Paul Adam and Jean Moréas . Other authors soon joined the movement of the verse librisme (German verse librism ). The librarians of the early years are Jean Ajalbert , Edouard Dujardin , Albert Mockel , Francis Vielé-Griffin , Émile Verhaeren , Adolphe Retté , Maurice Maeterlinck , Camille Mauclair and Stuart Merrill .
Enthusiastically welcomed by many as an act of liberation, it also met with contradiction and was viewed as subversive, as stated by the conservative poet Catulle Mendès in his official report à M. le ministre de l'Instruction publique et des beaux-arts sur le mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900 (1902) this outbreak of lyrical anarchism on the influence of foreign elements such as the Peruvian exile Nicanor della Rocca del Vergalo ( Poétique nouvelle , 1880) and the Polish Jewess Marie Krysinska ( Rhythmes pittoresques , 1890). Indeed, it is controversial whether Rimbaud or Krysinska are to be seen as the first representatives of the vers libre , since the first texts by Krysinska appeared in Le chat noir as early as 1882/1883 . However, it was objected that these texts were originally prose poems and that they were only brought into the form of vers libre by breaking lines when they were published in the Rhythmes pittoresques in 1890 .
As an example, the poem Provence by Gustave Kahn
C'est une face fine légère;
pourtant quelle noblesse vit dans ses traits menus,
et sa chair est claire,
non qu'elle évoque aucun aspect floral;
elle est chair, est claire
comme de la lumière astrale.
Le front est ample
et blanc comme un marbre de temple
où un fidèle a beaucoup prié;
les lèvres sont rouges pourpres,
non pourpre comme un hochet royal,
mais comme une une baie au gout profond,
au gout profond comme un sens
et qui renait dès qu'on le ceuille
et qui re, nait sous les baisers,
geste de faim de mes espérances.
Les yeux sont doux d'avoir contemplé
des mers d'argent bleui et des jardins près de la vague.
Ils ont gardé l'air attentif
et blessé par la douce musique
d'avoir entendu les plus belles chansons,
dans la douce langue des confins de la mer
la plus ardente et parfumée,
la divine Méditerranée.
Et quand elle sourit,
c'est la clarté sur les iles,
les iles blanches du lointain
qui s'éveillent sous le frais matin
de toutes leurs gerbes éblouies,
de toutes leurs herbes attendries.
Outside of France, verse librism initially remained largely unknown. That changed when TE Hulme and FS Flint presented the French verslibristes in 1909 at the Poets Club in London, which later became the nucleus of imagism . TS Eliot spoke of the birth of imagism as the "usual and suitable reference point for the beginning of modern poetry". Through the mediation of the imagists, the vers libre then exerted a lasting (and still lasting) influence on European and Anglo-American poetry. In addition to Eliot, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell are important intermediaries .
literature
- TS Eliot : Reflections on vers libre. In: ders .: To criticize the critic and other writings. Faber & Faber, London 1965.
- W. Theodor Elwert : French metric. Hueber, Munich 1961, ISBN 3-19-003021-9 , pp. 165-167.
- Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender , Burkhard Moennighoff (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon literature. Terms and definitions. 3. Edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-476-01612-6 , p. 806.
- Edouard Dujardin : Les premiers poètes du vers libre. Mercure de France, Paris 1922.
- Michel Murat: Le vers libre. Champion, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-7453-1694-3 .
- Clive Scott: Vers Libre: The Emergence of Free Verse in France 1886-1914. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1990, ISBN 0-19-815159-4 .
- Clive Scott: Reading the rhythm: The poetics of French free verses 1910–1930. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993, ISBN 0-19-815882-3 .
- Clive Scott, D. Evans: Vers libre. In: Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman et al. (Ed.): The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012, ISBN 978-0-691-13334-8 , pp. 1516–1518 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
Individual evidence
- ↑ La Vogue Vol. 1 No. 6 (1886)
- ↑ La Vogue Vol. 1 No. 9 (1886)
- ↑ Clive Scott, D. Evans: Vers libre. In: Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman et al. (Ed.): The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012, ISBN 978-0-691-13334-8 , p. 1517 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
- ↑ Clive Scott: Vers Libre: The Emergence of Free Verse in France 1886-1914. Oxford 1990.
- ^ In: Gustave Kahn: Le livre d'images. Paris 1897
- ↑ "... the point de repère usually and conveniently taken [...] as the starting point of modern poetry". TS Eliot: To criticize the critic . Speech at Washington University in June 1953. In: ders .: To criticize the critic and other writings. Faber & Faber, London 1965.