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introduction
and Lyn Hejinian. That this tradition spans so many epochs in twentieth-
century poetry gives encouragement to those who would claim, as I do,
that the prose poem (distinct from the high merge of prose and poetic
writing, as in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All) represents at its
best an ultimate grandeur of poetic form.
In Rupture
The idea of rupture—with past traditions, with the past in one-
self, with the world around one—is not a modern one. After all, the Pre-
Raphaelites had every reason to think of themselves as a rupture from
Raphael, and, long before that, Rome was itself in rupture. The notion of
a break is delightfully romantic in the broad sense and allied to Romanti-
cism in a more restricted sense. The endurance of the idea is, like Louis-
René des Forêt’s prolonged use of the term ostinato—the basso continuo
or sostenuto underlying the melody or musical construction above it—
just as sustaining and continuing and obstinately inescapable as the idea
of progress.
Did modern French and Francophone poetry break from the past?
Certainly it did from the poetry of, say, Hugo and Verlaine, though less so
from a past represented by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. But
continuity, like discontinuity, is in the eye of the beholder. The declama-
tions found in some of Paul Claudel’s work (think of his Cinq grandes odes
and even his plays, such as Le Soulier de satin and the sublime Partage de
midi) and in much of Saint-John Perse’s poetry (Anabase, Éloges, and why
stop there?) are not necessarily in a di√erent key from those of Victor
Hugo—perhaps it’s only in their modulation that they di√er significantly,
with no ‘‘hélas’’ needed.∫
Baudelaire’s splenetic laments, Rimbaud’s illuminating vision and re-
vision, and Mallarmé’s abstraction, idealism, and typographic revolution
find equivalents not only in the early part of the century but in an undy-
ing present. Why not? Poetry is large enough to absorb innovation as it
goes along.
Re-Viewing
In all ages of French literature, poetry has found itself reinvigo-
rated by constraints, possibilities, and re-visioning, as in the mode of the
poets of OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of
Potential Literature).Ω This literature finds its freedoms and attendant
pleasures in rules and rigorous constraints. The Oulipian Georges Perec
wrote La Disparition (translated as A Void), a nearly three-hundred-page