Medieval
a. General Characteristics. The term ‘lyric’, although widely used today to refer to a particular tradition of French poetry in the Middle Ages, was not available to medieval poets; they deploy instead a range of more or less precise generic terms to designate a wide range of compositions which tend to be short, strophic, sung to music, and organized around a first-person voice, and which deal prominantly (though by no means exclusively) with the theme of love. Terms such as vers (in Occitan) or chanson in French have a relatively unspecific meaning. Some medieval terms (such as sirventes) designate content primarily, since sirventes are often formal imitations (contrafacta) of existing love songs. Others (such as jeu parti) are mainly formal: a great variety of topics are debated in these texts, it is the debate form itself which defines the genre. Yet others (such as alba, the dawn song) highlight both narrative content (lovers' separation at dawn) and a characteristic formal feature (a refrain word, alba). The analysis of medieval lyric poetry cannot straightforwardly assume the priority of either substantive or formal characteristics.
A typological distinction which has proved useful is that between ‘aristocratic’ (aristocratisant) and ‘popularizing’ registers, elaborated by Pierre Bec. By ‘register’ here is meant a common store of potential constituents for a song of a particular type: characteristic motifs, phraseology, verse forms, and so on. The ‘popularizing register’ comprises lyric verse with a narrative cast like the alba or the pastourelle; verses apparently conceived as dance-tunes, such as the estampie or the rondeau; verses incorporating ‘popular’ refrains; first-person songs in a woman's voice (chansons de femme, chansons de toile, chansons de mal-mariée); comic or burlesque songs—any song, in short, which does not share the perspective of a courtly male speaker. ‘Aristocratic’ genres include love songs (cansos in Occitan, the grand chant courtois in French); reflective, moral, religious, or political songs using similar forms (e.g. sirventes, songs to the Virgin such as those by Gautier de Coinci, and crusade songs); and the debate genres. The terms ‘popularizing’ and ‘aristocratic’ do not imply the expected social class of either composer or audience. Both ‘aristocratic’ and ‘popularizing’ songs can be ascribed to the same poet, such as Thibaut de Champagne. And poets who emerge from the towns or from clerical milieux, rather than from the aristocracy, such as Adam de la Halle, may compose ‘aristocratic’ songs.
This distinction becomes less helpful in the later Middle Ages, with the rise of a new kind of poetic voice: that of the clerk, in the sense the term had in the Middle Ages, when it designates not so much a cleric as a scholar and intellectual. With such figures as Rutebeuf and Machaut the writer's craft becomes an important component of the lyric. Formal skill, developed in the formes fixes (such as the ballade or virelai), becomes an index less of inherent refinement (as in earlier ‘aristocratic’ song) than of writerly achievement. Music remains an important element of lyric composition (notably in the case of Machaut, celebrated as a composer and musical innovator) [see Words And Music, I]. But after Machaut lyric poetry tends to be increasingly divorced from music and inserted into other written texts, such as dits. Thus Villon, for example, inserted 19 lyric pieces of various genres into his Grand Testament. Musicality comes to be regarded as an inherent trait of poetry which no longer needs the addition of a musical accompaniment; thus Deschamps's Art de dictier (1392) emphasizes the ‘musique naturelle’ of verse in opposition to the ‘musique artificielle’ of music, an idea repeated as late as Molinet's Art de rhétorique (1492).
b. Before 1300. Despite the difficulties of classification, and hence of generalization, lyric poetry to the end of the 13th c. tends to be thought of as dominated by the love song (canso or grand chant courtois), even though this makes up less than half of the surviving texts, because so many other genres (especially the ‘aristocratic’ ones) are formal calques of it. In this period, text and music seem to have been closely associated. Poets (troubadours in Occitan, trouvères in northern French) were also composers, and their songs were composed in strophes, each of which, in any song, shared the same metrical structure and thus could be sung to the same tune. (One genre, the descort, is defined by the fact that it flouts this convention and gives each successive stanza a different metrical shape). In the love song, both metre and tune were usually unique to their particular song. This gave an especial prominence to the opening stanza, which often contains the most striking imagery, or the most dramatic claims, of the whole song. In subsequent stanzas, form and tune are recapitulated and the content elaborated, but with the exception of a few poets (Bernart de Ventadorn, Thibaut de Champagne) the central part of the song is not made the occasion for rhetorical display. Instead, poetic energy is gathered for the end, often a direct request for love or action, which may be expressed in the final stanza and/or in a partial stanza, termed a tornada in Occitan, an envoi in French, soliciting the favour of the poem's addressee (s).
Composed to be sung, and presumably usually sung from memory without the support of a written text, the opening and, to a lesser extent closing stanzas are those whose position is most fixed. Intermediate stanzas appear in different manuscript copies with a considerable variety of orderings, and sometimes stanzas are omitted or interpolated. The close correspondence between melody and metre was probably a useful mnemonic. But the rhyme scheme of a lyric does not necessarily correspond with its musical form; and it far oustrips the requirements of a memory-aid. Rhyme schemes are sometimes so intricate and the rhyme words so unusual as to be a song's principal form of ornament. Rather than the rhymes conforming to the music, the music is made to serve and enhance the rhymes, protracting the rhyme syllable with elegant swirls of notes (melismata).
The content of love songs in this period rehearses the paradoxes of fin'amor. The first-person singer represents his feelings as simultaneously worthy and transgressive. He loves a lady, but often assimilates her, by the use of feudal imagery, to a man. Other paradoxes abound. A singer professes to sing under the compulsion of personal feeling, but also in the hope of pleasing a lady or patron. A song is both new and traditional, conventional and sincere. The formal exquisiteness of the lyric is therefore made to house, and hold in balance, a set of tensions and contradictions which yield interesting reflections on conceptions of the self, the social, and the relation of sentiment to language.
Northern French trouvères who begin their songs with professions of sincerity and novelty are being particularly disingenuous, since so many of their songs follow the form and phraseology of Occitan models. Lyric poetry had become a prestige medium and the lyric subject is characterized in terms similar to a hero of romance. The desire these texts express can be seen as the desire to be the subject of a lyric, rather than to succeed in whatever the ostensible theme of a song might be. When, from the end of the 13th c. onwards, new forms such as the ballade and the virelai rise to prominence, this sense of participating in a literary tradition increases rather than diminishes.
c. Later Middle Ages. The poets of the 14th and 15th c. take this process a stage further: the desire of Machaut, Charles d'Orléans, or Villon could be said to be the subject not just of the lyric but of the œuvre. It is characteristic of these writers that, like Machaut, they should be concerned with the materiality of their production: its copying, its anthologization, the disposition of stanza and line on the page itself; that they should wish, like Deschamps or Molinet, to analyse and codify the very essence of the lyric project; that they should show a predilection for the more weighty, flamboyantly difficult verse-forms such as the lai or the complainte. Technical virtuosity foregrounds and solemnizes the poetic je, its conflicting impulses dramatized through allegorical figures in the wake of the Roman de la Rose, or through exteriorizations of a fragmented self such as Cœur, Penser, or Corps. The poet's analysis is directed inwards (Christine de Pizan's widowhood; Machaut's mildly ironic old man's passion in the Voir Dit) or conscious of a political and social mission (Deschamps's vituperative counterpoint to the vices of his time; Alain Chartier's sonorous denunciations of the princes of France). The poet, in other words, is not a mere entertainer, but a person of substance whose self merits examination and whose opinions have weight.
This shift in perspective—from periphery of court life to centre of the moral universe—characterizes the Rhétoriqueurs, officially constituted court poets par excellence, whose words are designed to be in themselves a memorial of those whom they serve, and demand, therefore, a maximum of poetic sophistication. To display learning, to manipulate an elegant allegory, to multiply linguistic and prosodic virtuosities, is to attach to poetry all the solemnity of their official verse.
[Sarah Kay and Jane Taylor]
Bibliography
- D. Poirion, L'Évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans (1965)
- P. Bec, La Lyrique française au Moyen Âge: contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques, 2 vols. (1977-8)
Modern
a. Renaissance. The domination of 16th-c. French poetry by the Pléiade should not be allowed to obscure the talents of its immediate predecessors. Clément Marot still belongs to the medieval tradition, cultivating the stylistic complexity of the Rhétoriqueurs, but his later verse epistles show an elegant badinage and his biblical paraphrases an unadorned lyric vigour which are humanist. Neoplatonic and Petrarchan influences are first felt in the work of the Lyon poets, particularly in Scève's Délie. But Scève's restrained, hermetic art has little in common with the searing passion of Louise Labé's sonnets. The object of Labé's unrequited love is assumed to be Olivier de Magny, whose poems of spiritual exile in Rome, Soupirs, pre-date Du Bellay's similar Regrets by a year. The link between the Lyon school and the Pléiade is provided by Pontus de Tyard, who, with Jodelle, Peletier du Mans, Baïf, Belleau, Du Bellay, and Ronsard, makes up the constellation. The ‘programme’ of these poets enjoins a thoroughgoing imitation of classical models (hence Baïf's attempts to introduce quantitative principles into French verse). The immediate successor of the Pléiade was the proto-précieux Desportes, whose detached urbanity sets him far apart from the rough-hewn, tumultuous commitment of contemporary Protestant poets, such as Du Bartas, d' Aubigné, and Sponde.
b. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Malherbe presides over the poetry of the first decades of the 17th c. as its brusque lawgiver: precision of language, fixity of caesura, prohibition of hiatus, chevilles, and commonplace rhymes, semantic integrity of stanzas—in short, poetic intensity through formal rigour and linguistic spareness. Malherbe's theories are only available in his Commentaires sur Desportes and the account of his disciple Racan, who with his master and Mainard represented a tendency firmly resisted by Régnier and Théophile de Viau. These poets worked to reinstate the claims of spontaneous inspiration, decoration, and a syntax and diction freely conceived. With the development of the salons and of preciosity, poetry became the preserve of a social élite set on refining feelings and language to a paroxysm of exquisiteness. Voiture was the ‘court poet’ of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and his entourage included Benserade, Gombauld, and Malleville. Independent of the cult of preciosity, but not untouched by it, were the ‘baroque’ poets Tristan l'Hermite and Saint-Amant, who excelled in the burlesque. A much sterner enemy of the précieux was Boileau, who championed Malherbe's classical principles; but Boileau's reputation is also founded on his Juvenalian Satires, his mock-epic Le Lutrin, and his Horatian Épîtres. By Boileau's standards, the vers libres classiques of La Fontaine's Fables are excessively free; the attraction of these vers mêlés lies not only in their improvised and virtuosic quality, but also, and paradoxically, in their apparently unlaboured naturalness, a quality seen also in several poets of the late 17th c.: Deshoulières, Chaulieu, La Fare.
The lyric suffered in the 18th c. from a surfeit of ossified diction, mythological allusion, and unwieldy rhetoric. Poets found it difficult to occupy the middle ground between ratiocinative gravity and social entertainment. To some (La Motte, Fontenelle) poetry seemed wilful mystification and a dangerous enthralment of judgement; Voltaire had to admit that ‘de toutes les nations polies, la nôtre est la moins poétique’, rich in poetics, poor in poetry. J.-B. Rousseau, a protégé of Boileau's, is best known for his odes, cantatas, and epigrams: his hetero-metric and hetero-stanzaic structures have a diversity of pace and metrical eventfulness which can please over larger spans. Le Franc de Pompignan's ‘Ode sur la mort de J.-B. Rousseau’ has an adroit mixture of paradox and pathos, found also in his biblical verse. The ode is equally the forte of Écouchard Lebrun. After the mid-century, the influence of English topographical and seasonal poetry was felt: Virgil and James Thomson combined to engender Saint-Lambert's Les Saisons, Roucher's Les Mois, and Delille's Les Jardins. The century's poetry culminated in the work of André Chénier: elegies, odes, epistles, idylls, scientific and philosophical poems, and the bitterly satirical Iambes.
c. Romantic Poetry. Chénier's poems were finally published in 1819, shortly after the intense, confessional Élégies et romances of Desbordes-Valmore, and a year before Romanticism's ‘official’ poetic inception with Lamartine's Méditations (‘Je suis le premier … qui ai donné à ce qu'on nommait la Muse, au lieu d'une lyre de sept cordes de convention, les fibres mêmes du cœur de l'homme …’). Very different from Lamartine's suave melancholy is Vigny's blunt and clear-headed disillusionment, his stoical idealism, expressed in poems published between 1822 and 1864 (Les Destinées). Vigny has little of the verse and ironic fantaisie associated with Musset's earlier verse, qualities which were transformed into the altogether darker hues of Les Nuits. Bestriding the century, both as figurehead and survivor of Romanticism, is Hugo, whose work explores all dimensions of the movement: the picturesque and exotic (Les Orientales), the sentimentally familial (Les Feuilles d'automne), the politically committed ( Les Châtiments), spiritual autobiography ( Les Contemplations), and cultural history ( La Légende des siècles). Throughout Hugo's work one finds moments of intense visionary encounter, involving both memory and fantasy; similar encounters are recorded in Nerval's Les Chimères, different, however, in their unaffected familiarity with myth, in their peculiarly confident hermeticism.
d. Symbolism and Parnassianism. The achievement of vision in and through language is a central concern of the Symbolist poets, whether in Baudelaire's ‘surnaturalisme’, in Rimbaud's ‘long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’, or in Mallarmé's image of the poet as ‘une aptitude qu'a l'Univers spirituel à se voir et se développer’. These enterprises involve the suppression of the personal voice of the poet, as he yields the initiative to words or inhabits other consciousnesses (Baudelaire's ‘sainte prostitution de l'âme’, Rimbaud's ‘Je est un autre’). Alongside the visionary runs the intimate, the tracing of feelings which do not have the unambiguous, self-justifying power of Romantic feeling, but are fleeting, mixed with sensation, multiple (Verlaine, Henri de Régnier, Samain). A third current derives from the irony cultivated by Baudelaire in the figures of the dandy and the fallen angel: the poem becomes the site of psychological investigation, a probing of the layers of consciousness which exist between the poet and his self, poet and reader; the contract of complicity with the reader is broken, and meaning constantly shifts in the relationship of mutual distrust, while language flouts the poetic in the prosaic or whimsical (Verlaine, Cros, Corbière, Laforgue).
From the 1850s, and particularly Gautier's Émaux et camées, dates the other large trend of the latter half of the 19th c., Parnassianism, whose coherence is difficult to establish other than negatively. That there was a reaction against the facility and self-exposure of the Romantics, their amateurism and glorification of the poetic gift, cannot be doubted. But this response is common to Symbolism too. Gautier makes a virtue of difficulty, to the point of virtuosity, as does, in even more acrobatic vein, Banville, with his revival of fixed forms. But this aesthetic prizing of the dulce over the utile does not square with Leconte de Lisle's philosophical and positivistic historicism, with its appealing note of unappeasable yearning, nor with the domestic realism of François Coppée, nor with the melancholy moralizing of Sully Prudhomme. And Heredia's sonnet-cycle, Les Trophées, for all its epic historical scale, is full of Symbolism in its suggestive ellipses and compressions.
e. Twentieth Century. Symbolism's heritage in the 20th c. runs through the dynamic socialism of Verhaeren and the rustic Catholicism of Jammes, and culminates in Valéry's subtle enquiry into creative consciousness and a purified poetic act, an enquiry reopened much later by Deguy and the poet-mathematician Roubaud. The Catholic tradition of the early century found its most powerful expression in the ample, magisterial versets of Claudel's Cinq grandes odes and in the obsessive insistence of Péguy's verse. The all-encompassing, rhapsodic, Whitmanian strain in Claudel is to be found in other poets, in the Unanimists (Jules Romains), in globe-trotting poets such as Cendrars, Larbaud, and Saint-John Perse. Cendrars shared with Apollinaire an enthusiasm for the contemporary arts, and particularly for the aesthetic of simultaneity; the latter's Calligrammes explore the ‘idéogramme lyrique’, while Reverdy, in his turn, uses layout to project his linguistic Cubism. Reverdy's definition of the image (‘Plus les rapports de deux réalités rapprochées seront lointaines et justes, plus l'image sera forte’) lies at the heart of Surrealist poetics, itself inextricably linked with the visual arts [see Breton; éLuard; Desnos; Aragon]. On the fringes of Surrealism, Supervielle pursued his intuited presences, while Jouve fused Freud with Christianity in a prophetic mode; the voice of Christian vision is also to be heard in Jouve's disciple Pierre Emmanuel and in Patrice de La Tour du Pin.
Eluard, Aragon, Desnos, Emmanuel were poets of the Resistance, as was Char, whose later collections are suffused by an elliptical elementalism. A vein of wit in modern French poetry is represented by Prévert, Queneau, and Tardieu; these poets achieve their effects by adopting the unauthorized point of view, as indeed do the poets who adopt ‘le parti pris des choses’, Ponge and Guillevic. In many senses Ponge and Guillevic are in search of the same revelation of inalienable being as Bonnefoy; the answer of Henri Michaux to the blankness or hostility of available reality lies in the exorcizing power of language itself. Jacottet and Réda, on the other hand, aim to capture the epiphanies of past and passing sensation, the one in a poetry drastically pared down, the other in a fuller, elegiac mode. If the French language is a means of transformation and redemption for some, for others it is full of potential treacheries and misrepresentations: the founding poets of négritude, Senghor and Césaire, had to colonize French to express the universals of blackness; and, in their footsteps, a francophone poetry of alternative ethnic identities and histories has proliferated in sub-Saharan Africa, the West Indies, the countries of the Maghreb, and Quebec. [See also Anthologies; Versification.]
[Clive Scott]
Bibliography
- G. Brereton, An Introduction to the French Poets: Villon to the Present Day (rev. edn., 1973)
- S. Brindeau, La Poésie contemporaine de langue française depuis 1945 (1973)
- R. Sabatier, Histoire de la poésie française, 9 vols. (1975-88)
- K. Aspley and P. France (eds.), Poetry in France (1992)
