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Do you have a taste for French poetry?

2022-04-04T06:19:29.345Z


“The best choice of poems is the one you make for yourself,” wrote Paul Eluard. Le Figaro offers you a poetic anthology thanks to Franck Médioni's book.


What is poetry, and what is its purpose?

This question undoubtedly requires a poem… The noun “poetry” comes from the Greek

poiein

which means “to do, to create”.

In the Middle Ages, the poet was called "troubadour" or "trouvère", that is to say "finder".

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"Poetry is indeed a matter of language which is inhabited, worked, tampered with, triturated, harassed, tracked, truffled, bumped, short-circuited, torn, disheveled, twisted, tense", writes Franck Médioni in the preface to his anthology

Le taste for French poetry.

It is for the writer, a “semantic act of appropriation of the world”.

This is why the language is not fixed but in continual becoming...

Poetic praise of spring by the ancients

How, for example, to seize the spring?

"

Time has left its coat / Of wind, cold and rain, / And has dressed in embroidery, / Of shining sun, clear and beautiful

", says Charles of Orléans in one of his roundels.

The literary fame of the prince is essentially due to his long period of English captivity, following the debacle of Agincourt, on October 25, 1415

. crye: / Time has left its coat / Of wind, cold and rain.

»: this rondeau is one of the oldest poems in French literature.

Like an echo of the verses of the sovereign, Clément Marot sighs: “

My beautiful spring and my summer / Have made the leap through the window. / Love, you have been my master, / I have served you over all the gods.

This eighth, taken from

Epigrammes

, is only part of the very abundant work of this classical poet of the sixteenth century, who also participates in the medieval tradition.

Let us now continue our walk towards the Alexandrians;

so let's find Ulysses on the Palatine Hill… “

Happy who like Ulysses, had a beautiful journey / Or like the one who conquered the fleece, / And then returned, full of use and reason, / To live between his parents the rest about his age!

»

The Regrets collection

by Joachim du Bellay, published in 1558, comprises one hundred and ninety-one sonnets, a poetic form born in Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance.

It is imbued with great melancholy: exiled in Italy, its author is homesick: "

More my Gallic Dormouse, than the Latin Tiber, / More my little Liré, than the Palatine Hill, And more than the sea air Angevin sweetness

.”

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To undo this despondency, let's take a few verses from Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle: "

But if, disillusioned with tears and laughter, / Altered by the oblivion of this restless world, / You want, no longer knowing how to forgive or curse , / To taste a supreme and gloomy voluptuousness, / Come!

The sun tarries you in sublime words;

Absorb yourself endlessly in its implacable flame

.

This poem, entitled “Midi, roi desétés”, is the scene of a very pictorial description of the season, in particular in its first five stanzas: “

Midi, roi desétés, épandu sur laplain, / Tombe en nappes d’ silver from the heights of the blue sky.

/ Everything is silent.

The air blazes and burns breathlessly;

/ The earth is drowsy in its robe of fire.

»

Poetry, the true breath of man

In short, poetry is “

the most ardent and imprecise form of life

”, explains Pierre Reverdy, friend of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Jean Gris.

The author likes to accumulate images, jostle them, to account for the movements of his thoughts: "

All the distance from you to me - from the life which quivers on the surface of my hand to the mortal smile of love at its end - staggers, torn.

Leopardi considered poetry to be the "

summit of human discourse

", relates Franck Médioni in the preface to the anthology.

"

If we look for the original meaning of poetry, we find that it is the true breath of man, the source of all knowledge and this knowledge itself in its most immaculate aspect.

, writes Benjamin Péret.

In it is condensed all the spiritual life of humanity since it began to become aware of its nature.

In it now throb its highest creations, and, earth forever fertile, it keeps perpetually in reserve the colorless crystals and the harvests of tomorrow.

»

The taste for French poetry

also identifies those great poets who have sublimated or adopted the French language, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegalese, Ghérasim Luca, Romanian, but also Philippe Jaccottet, Swiss, Maurice Maeterlinck and Jean-Pierre Verheggen, Belgian authors, or Nimrod, Chadian of origin.

It is divided into three parts, in chronological order: the ancients, the moderns and the contemporaries.

"

I can say that the production of this little book will have aroused a contrasting bouquet of joys, enthusiasms, astonishments by offering me unexpected avatars of this chemistry of lives, writings and chances that could well be the essence of what we call poetry

", concludes Franck Médioni.

A charming little book.

Source: lefigaro

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