Macaronic Verse

macaronic verse, poetry in which two or more languages are mixed together. Strictly, the term denotes a kind of comic verse in which words from a vernacular language are introduced into Latin (or other foreign‐language) verses and given Latin inflections; such verse had a vogue among students in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, but is rare in English. More loosely, the term is applied to any verses in which phrases or lines in a foreign language are frequently introduced: several medieval English poems have Latin refrains or alternating Latin and English lines, and in modern times the poems of Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot have been called macaronic for their use of lines in several languages.

Burlesque, often mock-epic, poetry tagging Latin endings on to vernacular words became fashionable in Italy from 1490. It was introduced to France by ‘Arena’, alias Antoine des Arens, whose basses danses Ad suos compagnones (1529) and satire Meygra entrepriza catoliqui imperatoris (1537) facetiously incorporate Gallicisms and Provençalisms. Subsequent practitioners include Belleau (De bello huguenotico), Molière (Le Malade imaginaire), and one Josselin, Sj, who shortly before 1700 described festivities in Autun. The tradition of bilingual or multilingual verse, sometimes loosely considered ‘macaronic’, began among Anglo-Norman, French, and Occitan poets in the late 12th c. and continues with Prévert's ‘Chant song’ (Spectacle, 1949).

— Peter Davies

Originally, poetry in which words of different languages were mixed together or, more strictly, words in the poet's venacular were given the inflectional endings of another language, usually for humorous or satiric effect. In modern times, however, in recognition of the multilingual relationships of sound and sense between different languages, it is used most often with serious intent, thus transformed from a species of comic or nonsense verse into poetry characterized by scholarly techniques of composition, allusion, and structure.