Corbière, Tristan (Tristan Édouard-Joachim Corbière) (1845-75). One of the great original poets of the 19th c. His father Édouard was a fine seaman and a novelist. Tristan, born at Coat-Congar in Brittany, settled for a time in Roscoff, where he sailed his boat and shocked the inhabitants by his grotesque dressing-up. He was sickly, deformed by arthritis, and many of his poems express disgust at his own ugliness. He seems to have been spiritually ‘adopted’ (1871) by Count Rodolphe de Battin and his mistress, ‘Marcelle’, whom he worshipped. Les Amours jaunes (1873) were totally ignored by the public. In December 1874, transported to hospital by his friends, he writes to his mother: ‘Je suis à Dubois, dont on fait les cercueils.’ Recognition began only later when Verlaine wrote about him in Les Poètes maudits (1884).
The rhythms of popular speech are crammed into regular verse, giving it new life. Corbière senses the power and onward flow of the traditional French alexandrine strongly (e.g. ‘Bambine’), and in his hands its energy is so intense that it becomes disrupted, rather as magnifying the energy of waves causes them to break. This is one of the secrets of his brilliant sea poetry.
A self-ironist like Laforgue, Corbière's masks are intended to reveal rather than conceal. Unlike Laforgue, what is revealed is not facetious, but tragic and tormented. Sincerity is achieved through irony, subverting the conventional categories of emotion. The registers of popular speech are introduced, along with many different voices. The latter are often those of sailors—for the ordinary man's experience of life is more immediate, hence more poetic. ‘La Fin’, one of his greatest poems, is an outburst against the landsman's romantic clichés to be found in Hugo's ‘Oceano Nox’. What does Hugo know of the sailor's duel with death? Poetry, Corbière implies, needs above all reality.
[Graham Dunstan Martin]
Bibliography
- A. Sonnenfeld, L'Œuvre poétique de Corbière (1960)
- F. F. Burch, Corbière (1970)
- R. L. Mitchell, Corbière (1979)
