Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

line that is the staple of French poetry from the Renaissance to the late nine-
teenth century—has been grossly exaggerated.
Roubaud’s dramatic story begins in the twelfth century with a short frag-
ment of a Provençal poem dedicated to the exploits of Alexander the Great,
written by one Alberic de Pisançon.^1 This poem, written in octosyllabics, was
soon followed by a decasyllabic (pentameter) Alexandre, and then in 1170
Lambert le Tort de Chateaudun introduced the decisive innovation destined
to create an indissoluble link between the hero and the meter in which his
exploits were to be celebrated in the many Alexander poems that followed—a
line that had twelve syllables and a complex set of rules. In the Alexander
poems that now proliferated, the hero was depicted as conqueror and lover;
he tamed and mastered the wild horse Bucephalus, descended into the under-
world in a glass barrel, and was always the perfect chevalier courtois. By the
mid-¤fteenth century, the twelve-syllable line was named the alexandrine,
and it became the celebrated verse form that extended from Corneille and
Racine, as in the latter’s famous reference to Phèdre as

La ¤lle de Minos et de Pasiphaé

down to Baudelaire, whose alexandrines often break up not into hemistichs,
as in the above example, but into trimeters, as in:

A la très belle, à la très bonne, a la très chère

In its variable forms, the alexandrine remained intact until the fall of the
Paris Commune in 1870. In that year it experienced a catastrophe—the word
is well chosen because etymologically it means kata (down) plus strophe
(turning) and hence has metrical overtones—at the hands of Rimbaud’s
“revolutionary” poem “Qu’est-ce pour nous, mon coeur” (see La vieillesse
d’Alexandre 20–26). For here the rules, especially those relating to the neces-
sary prominence of the sixth syllable and the place of the silent e, were con-
sistently violated. And Roubaud relates this violation to the violation of the
social order, which is the impetus of Rimbaud’s oppositional poem. After
Rimbaud, so the common wisdom would have it, the “broken” alexandrine
was increasingly replaced by free verse: Apollinaire’s and Cendrars’s rhy thms
set the stage for what Roubaud calls “le vers libre international”—the free
verse now dominant around the world, whose only distinguishing feature is
lineation as such. Free verse, Roubaud notes, easily adapts linguistic units to
linear ones and is characterized by its formal indifference (204). Its absence
of rules makes it suitable for a global age, for free verse passes readily from

206 Chapter 11