Jean-Marie Besset is an author, translator and actor.
Would we not say that Ronsard, Du Bellay, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Marivaux, Musset, Lamartine, Rostand, Shakespeare, Byron, Kipling in England, who were all poets linked with the power of their time , and gave poetry a national dimension, were “right-wing” men?
Where Villon, Viau, up to Hugo, Rimbaud, Aragon, Char would be classified “on the left”?
Pound was denounced as a fascist, does that make him a lesser poet?
Lorca was murdered by fascists solely because of his homosexuality, not because of his poetry.
Cocteau was arrested for acts of collaboration.
However, he tried, in vain, to get Max Jacob (Jew and homosexual) out of the clutches of the Gestapo.
Among contemporaries, Harold Pinter was on the left, Michel Houellebecq is on the right.
On the dangers that political commitment poses to poets, Balzac presents in his
Lost Illusions
the terrible fable of the young provincial Lucien de Rubempré, a candid author seeking to publish his collection
Les Marguerites
, tossed from right-wing press to left-wing press, changing his opinion according to the women he loves and the roués he frequents.
The affair ends badly, but it is fiction.
Only “committed poetry” will ultimately appear mediocre and circumstantial.
Jean-Marie Besset
Now, during the Revolution, there was the very real and tragic case of the two poets from my dear department of Aude, André Chénier and Fabre D'Eglantine, who, by vacillating too much between monarchists and various revolutionary factions, were mainly occupied in treading water during the Revolution. this storm, were crushed, or rather shortened by the guillotine.
It is said that crying bitterly as he was led to the scaffold, the author of the famous hit “It's raining, it's raining, shepherdess” (at the expense or nostalgia of Marie-Antoinette?) was arrested by Danton, who said to him:
“Don’t worry, in a few days, you will make thousands of worms!”
.
From the French to the Soviet, from one Revolution to another, the treatment that Stalin reserved for Ossip Mandelstam sufficiently confirms that politicians are boundlessly cruel to the poets who have disappointed them.
Not to mention that being right or left is in no way constitutive of the poet's art.
Nor does it confer a certificate of genius.
“The line is immaterial!”
, would conclude the Lady Bracknell of Wilde's comedy.
Only “engaged poetry” will ultimately appear mediocre and circumstantial.
As for the signatories of this umpteenth forum, who proclaim themselves poets (which is already ridiculous, poet being typically a title that others bestow on you), under the benefit of inventory, we are ordered to take their word for it.
So there would be 600, no (these platforms are subject to metastases) 1200... tomorrow 2400?... poets in France, all set against this non-poet, this reactionary hydra, this scabby Sylvain Tesson?
When we think of all these Pénélopes of culture (Aurélie, Fleur, Audrey, Rima...) busy weaving social bonds, and seeing that their production of living together has borne so many beautiful fruits, this multitude of French poets of left, we can only rejoice.
Really.
That's wonderful.