French Verse Revisited

...Much of his discussion of the relationship between French and English literature, though, is new...

...Rhythm occasions yet another cultural misunderstanding...

...Barzun shines in explaining the origin of a now common phenomenon, the poète maudit...

...Again, because we have a mixed linguistic heritage, we often possess two words from separate sources with virtually the same meaning, but we traditionally favor the Germanic element...

...Barzun notes that the genuine writer came to view himself as one accursed (maudit) "doomed to misery, poverty, disease, and death...

...His breakthrough, in turn, influenced the American Imagists and their successors—including Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery...

...Baudelaire's verse lauded prostitutes and opium...

...Nevertheless, it is true English readerscontinue to snub the French...

...I can imagine no better way for the novice to appreciate the musical subtleties that the French language glories in than to study the interplay of sound, idea and metaphor so ably rendered by Barzun...

...With the unconscious bigotry that academics practice so well, the noted classicist and poet asked, "How is it that every nation has produced poetry except France...

...With popular culture shaping the useof words, poets began to see their mission (to borrow from Mallarmé's "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe") as Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu—or, inEliot's famous paraphrase in TheFour Quartets, "To purify the dialect of the tribe...

...When I was in school it was not uncommon to study French literary history more systematically than that of one's own culture and to memorize poems and speeches from plays, a practice by then abandoned in the English classroom...

...The most obvious one, he suggests, lies in the fact that "no two languages are closer and farther apart than English and French...

...he believed that they pandered to the clichés and prejudices of the semi-educated, thereby debasing the language and poisoning readers with superficial ideas...

...The Romantics sought to restore an Arcadian innocence to la poésie, to extol a reverence for Nature and the natural in the face of artifice...

...King Lear would sound silly raving in dactyls...

...Some readers continue to find that avant-garde work more akin to double acrostics than literature, and deplore the declineof "elevated" language...

...In a society that hailed members of the press as prophets and hierophants, Baudelaire insisted that poets ought to celebrate the forbidden as an antidote to bourgeois half-truths...

...Gide's diary reveals that he was too taken aback to reply: He wrote that he wished he had gathered the wit to quote one of Joachim du Bellay's lovely sonnets by way of an answer...

...And it is well known that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot transformed Modernism under the influence of François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière...

...At key points in English literary history we have owed France a profound debt...

...Still more significant is Barzun's rehabilitation of Victor Hugo, whom he regards as worthy of standing beside Shakespeare...

...Barzun recalls that as a child he sat on Guillaume Apollinaire's knees while the poet amused him by playing the kind of word games common in his writing...

...Many who piously pronounce Goethe and Dante the equals of Shakespeare would hoot with derision if anyone suggested that Racine or Victor Hugo should be added to this pantheon...

...But by the middle of the 19th century serious writers felt threatened by the popular press...

...Far from aiming for a broad audience, the most radical poetry deliberately sought a select group of readers by altering syntax patterns and eschewing anything familiar or conventional...

...English emphasizes the articulation of consonants, and allows vowels to be spoken carelessly...

...He clearly proves his thesis that those of us who read poetry, in whatever language, are refashioned by its sounds and concepts...

...On the other side, before Victor Hugo made Shakespeare fashionable in Paris, the Bard's terse Saxon speeches seemed harsh to the French...

...The opposite is true for French...

...Rimbaud called for nothing less than "the overthrow of order" in poetry...

...English speech falls naturally into iambs...

...Even more exteme, Alfred Jarry (author of the surrealist drama, Ubu roi) announced: "We will bring everything down in ruins, and then we will destroy the ruins...

...The venerable Jacques Barzun recalls this brief encounter in A n Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry (New Directions, 142 pp., $22.95) to illustrate the patronizing attitude of our culture toward French poetry...

...Dactyls or anapests are associated with light verse: limericks, the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, or the galloping horse of Alfred Noyes' "The Highway Man...

...In English, we are taught that the strength of a sentence depends on its verb, that adjectives weaken prose and can shipwreck poetry...

...They are furthest apart in turn of thought and, most important, in the way the 'same' sounds are uttered...

...A native French speaker, Barzun resents such cultural parochialism...

...An Essay on French Verse concludes with the text of Hugo's evocative poem, "Les Djinns," juxtaposed to Barzun's translation...

...Racine would never have dreamt of describing "the sinister eyes of the moon...

...His latest book represents the fruits of his search for plausible explanations of our arrogance...

...Verlaine condemned "literary" affectation in verse, favoring the casual idiom...

...Finally, in an alcoholic rage, he tried to murder Rimbaud, and spent several years in prison—all of which formed the subjects of his poetry...

...We also tend to associate the Latinate with academic, legal or medical jargon, so Racine can sound vague or "fancy...

...To the ear untrained in the nuances of French vowels, the poetry may jangle as discordantly as Poe's "Bells," since we assume that rhyme depends on the consonants...

...More accustomed to the elevated phrases of neoclassical drama, they found Hamlet primitive, barbaric...

...From [Baudelaire's] day onward it has been the expected thing that artists should not end triumphant in palaces but outcast in the charity hospital and the pauper's grave...

...However, French tragic heroines declaim in Alexandrines—a pattern that undulates excessively to our ears, as iambs stomp to theirs...

...During England's Restoration, Charles II's courtiers returned from exile in Paris and imitated Molière's verse comedies for the English stage...

...Similarly, authors working in the two languages base their concepts of good writing on different historical and linguistic models...

...Barzun is not content merely with Wghlighting such differences...

...Romance languages derive from Latin, where powerful rhetoric is achieved through the use of modifiers...

...A generation of American writers, led by Robert Lowell and John Berryman, would shortly look to their French predecessors for inspiration...

...Baudelaire denounced newspapers as ' Satanic...

...For anyone who has studied the language, he unquestionably succeeds...

...Parisians have their reasons for disdaining our high school pronunciations in their shops, restaurants and taxis: They actually cannot distinguish among, say, our loin (far), long (lengthy) or lent (slow)—words that we are apt to pronounce almost identically...

...But, as Barzun shows, contemporary poetry—in France, England and the United States—really remains an underground culture, waging war against jargon and trite "popular" writing...

...Chaucer discarded the heavily accented, alliterative prosody of Saxon epic in favor of the subtler Norman forms...

...But they are far apart in grammar and idiom and in the very meaning of those thousands of look-alikes...

...Paul Verlaine was so struck by the precocious genius of the 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud that he deserted his wife andinfant, became the boy's lover, lived like a bum, and otherwise defied conventional pieties...

...This book provides the best case I have yet seen against the argument that modern verse ought to be easily accessible to the untrained ear...

...Thus "deep," from the Anglo-Saxon, sounds more concrete to us than the Franco-Norman "profound...

...They are close in their mixed history and mutual borrowings, and they look close in their vocabularies—thousands of words are spelled exactly or nearly alike...

...In the United States, that pioneer romantic, Edgar Allan Poe, revolutionized poetic theory with French ideas...

...Hugo realized that the chaste Latinmodeled rhetoric French poets considered seemly was inadequate to express impressions of the unconscious...

...We learned in school that Edouard Dujardin's poetic novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés, influenced the interior monologues of Joyce's Ulysses, but not that the nonsense syllables and portmanteau words of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll introduced French 20thcentury verse to a whole new manner of thinking and hearing...

...France's giant among writers first introduced to his language the type of imagery we take for granted today in English...

...Some fin de siècle Decadents did more than merely write about degradation...

...Neoclassical French dramatists and sonneteers expunged everyday words from their lines in order to ennoble diction...

...Moreover, his examples will be old friends to those familiar with the literature...

...He hopes to convince his readers of the beauties of the French poetic tradition...

...I was delighted to discover, for instance, that the revolutionary poet, André Chénier, guillotined in 1794 at age 32, played the same transforming role in the French Romantic Movement as Thomas Chatterton or the Ossian forgeries did in its English counterpart...

...For centuries, poets saw themselves as priests of a holy muse and considered it their function to sing of heroic exploits or to elevate souls toward the sublime...