Tristan Corbiere and the Poetics of Irony (Oxford Modern by Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe

By Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe

Tristan Corbière is frequently considered because the archetypal poète maudit, a misunderstood insurgent and bohemian prankster. it is a learn of the poet's leading edge use of language. It makes use of the severe device of irony to investigate his idiosyncratic verse, displaying how he contributed to the overall revolution in poetic language that marked the 1870s in France. Corbière's poetry driven the ironic aspect in Baudelaire to its restrict and exerted a tremendous impression on Laforgue, Pound, and Eliot. It performed a key position within the ironic culture of Symbolism that's usually overshadowed by means of the "pure" poetry of contemporaries like Mallarmé. utilizing shut textual readings of poems from Les Amours jaunes (1873), the one assortment released in Corbière's lifetime, this publication outlines a style of interpreting his self-contradictory verse. It tackles the trouble of reading ironic discourse and demonstrates how irony operates in Les Amours jaunes in any respect degrees from verbal gadget to world-view, displaying how the doubts of recent guy and the non secular void of commodity tradition form the very language of his poetry. Synthesizing serious ways from continental and Anglo-American traditions, it analyzes his use of puns, oral diction, discussion, citation, and intertextuality. It exhibits how he systematically undercuts ordinary techniques of interpreting, through uploading novelistic innovations into verse to deride it from inside of, and through ironizing irony itself. this is often an advent to the paintings of a tough poet and a examine of the perform of analyzing French verse.

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The speaker of ‘Paria’ actively rejects a whole clutch of nineteenth-century clichés: ‘Qu’ils se payent des républiques, | Hommes libres! — carcan au cou —’ (1–2) attacks discourses of progress, ‘— L’idéal à moi: c’est un songe | Creux; mon horizon — l’imprévu —’ (21–2) attacks the ideal. The poem sets the speaker up as an anti-hero who condemns society and invites us to take his side. …— Par hasard j’ai pu naître; | Peut-être en est-il — par hasard…’ (53–4). He also shows the pain of this isolation by evoking the absence of contact in concrete physical terms: ⁵³ ‘Une étude sur Corbière’, 8.

42 Voice-Defying Lyricism as a communicative strategy or dialogue. Edmund Wilson describes this kind of poetry as ‘conversational-ironic’,⁶⁹ and it is worth unpacking his term to consider how the evasiveness of irony is inextricably linked to the immediacy of living speech. We have already seen instances of this: the use of contrasting voices in successive poems, and the plurality of voices which coexist within the individual ‘À Marcelle’ poems. Corbière’s poems present themselves as living utterances.

The self-conscious wit of poems like ‘À la mémoire de Zulma’ constantly rebounds on the poet himself, making it difficult to identify a conventional lyric subject. ‘Épitaphe’ describes the elusive subject in the third person with paradoxical statements such as: Ne fut quelqu’un, ni quelque chose Son naturel était la pose. (42–3) Poems like ‘À la mémoire de Zulma’ turn this into a first person performance by systematically destabilizing the je lyrique. Speakers sometimes actively use puns as self-punishment, but wordplay also exposes things which are beyond the speaker’s control.

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