French poetry


French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.

French prosody and poetics

The modern French language does not have a significant stress accent or long and short syllables. This means that the French metric line is generally not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables. The most common metric lengths are the ten-syllable line, the eight-syllable line and the twelve-syllable line.
In traditional French poetry, all permissible liaisons are made between words. Furthermore, unlike modern spoken French, a silent or mute 'e' counts as a syllable before a consonant and is pronounced, but is elided before a vowel. When it falls at the end of a line, the mute "e" is hypermetrical. .
The ten-syllable and 12-syllable lines are generally marked by a regular syntactical pause, called a "césure" :
  • The ten-syllable line is often broken into syntactical groups as 5-5, 4-6, or 6-4.
  • The alexandrine is broken into two six-syllable groups; each six-syllable group is called a "hémistiche".
In traditional poetry, the césure cannot occur between two words that are syntactically linked, nor can it occur after an unelided mute e.
For example:
The verses are alexandrines. The mute e in "d'une" is pronounced and is counted in the syllables ; the mute e at the end of "qui m'aime" is hypermetrical. No word occurs across the sixth to seventh syllable in both lines, thus creating the cesura.
The rules of classical French poetry also put forward the following:
  • the encounter of two unelided and awkward vowel sounds -- such as "il a à"—was to be avoided;
  • the alternance of masculine and feminine rhymes was mandated;
  • rhymes based on words that rhymed, but that—in their spellings—had dissimilar endings were prohibited ;
  • a word could not be made to rhyme with itself;
  • in general, "enjambement" was to be avoided.
For more on rhymes in French poetry, see Rhyme in French.
Poetic forms developed by medieval French poets include:
Other poetic forms found in French poetry:

Medieval

As is the case in other literary traditions, poetry is the earliest French literature; the development of prose as a literary form was a late phenomenon. In the medieval period, the choice of verse form was generally dictated by the genre: the Old French epics were usually written in ten-syllable assonanced "laisses", while the chivalric romances were usually written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets.
Medieval French lyric poetry was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence—including Toulouse, Poitiers, and the Aquitaine region—where "langue d'oc" was spoken ; in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab world. The Occitan or Provençal poets were called troubadours, from the word "trobar". Lyric poets in Old French are called "trouvères", using the Old French version of the word. The occitan troubadours were amazingly creative in the development of verse forms and poetic genres, but their greatest impact on medieval literature was perhaps in their elaboration of complex code of love and service called "fin amors" or, more generally, courtly love. For more information on the troubadour tradition, see Provençal literature.
By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic tendencies are apparent in the Roman de Fauvel in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church filled with medieval motets, lais, rondeaux and other new secular forms of poetry and music. The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chansons was Guillaume de Machaut. .
French poetry continued to evolve in the 15th century. Charles, Duke of Orléans was a noble and head of one of the most powerful families in France during the Hundred Years' War. Captured in the Battle of Agincourt, he was a prisoner of the English from 1415 to 1441 and his ballades often speak of loss and isolation. Christine de Pisan was one of the most prolific writers of her age; her "Cité des Dames" is considered a kind of "feminist manifesto". François Villon was a student and vagabond whose two poetic "testaments" or "wills" are celebrated for their portrayal of the urban and university environment of Paris and their scabrous wit, satire and verbal puns. The image of Villon as vagabond poet seems to have gained almost mythic status in the 16th century, and this figure would be championed by poetic rebels of the 19th century and 20th centuries.

Renaissance

Poetry in the first years of the 16th century is characterised by the elaborate sonorous and graphic experimentation and skillful word games of a number of Northern poets, generally called "les Grands Rhétoriqueurs" who continued to develop poetic techniques from the previous century. Soon however, the impact of Petrarch, Italian poets in the French court, Italian Neo-platonism and humanism, and the rediscovery of certain Greek poets would profoundly modify the French tradition. In this respect, the French poets Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais are transitional figures: they are credited with some of the first sonnets in French, but their poems continue to employ many of the traditional forms.
The new direction of poetry is fully apparent in the work of the humanist Jacques Peletier du Mans. In 1541, he published the first French translation of Horace's "Ars poetica" and in 1547 he published a collection of poems "Œuvres poétiques", which included translations from the first two cantos of Homer's Odyssey and the first book of Virgil's Georgics, twelve Petrarchian sonnets, three Horacian odes and a Martial-like epigram; this poetry collection also included the first published poems of Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard.
Around Ronsard, Du Bellay and Jean Antoine de Baïf there formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court. The character of their literary program was given in Du Bellay's manifesto, the "Defense and Illustration of the French Language" which maintained that French was a worthy language for literary expression and which promulgated a program of linguistic and literary production and purification. For some of the members of the Pléiade, the act of the poetry itself was seen as a form of divine inspiration, a possession by the muses akin to romantic passion, prophetic fervor or alcoholic delirium.
The forms that dominate the poetic production of the period are the Petrarchian sonnet cycle and the Horace/Anacreon ode. Ronsard also tried early on to adapt the Pindaric ode into French. Throughout the period, the use of mythology is frequent, but so too is a depiction of the natural world. Other genres include the paradoxical encomium, the "blason" of the female body, and propagandistic verse.
Several poets of the period—Jean Antoine de Baïf, Blaise de Vigenère and others—attempted to adapt into French the Latin, Greek or Hebrew poetic meters; these experiments were called "vers mesurés" and "prose mesuré".
Although the royal court was the center of much of the century's poetry, Lyon – the second largest city in France in the Renaissance – also had its poets and humanists, most notably Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet, Olivier de Magny and Pontus de Tyard. Scève's Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu – composed of 449 ten syllable ten line poems and published with numerous engraved emblems – is exemplary in its use of amorous paradoxes and allegory to describe the suffering of a lover.
Poetry at the end of the century was profoundly marked by the civil wars: pessimism, dourness and a call for retreat from the world predominate. However, the horrors of the war were also to inspire one Protestant poet, Agrippa d'Aubigné, to write a brilliant poem on the conflict:Les Tragiques.

Classical French poetry

Because of the new conception of "l'honnête homme" or "the honest or upright man", poetry became one of the principal modes of literary production of noble gentlemen and of non-noble professional writers in their patronage in the 17th century.
Poetry was used for all purposes. A great deal of 17th- and 18th-century poetry was "occasional", written to celebrate a particular event or to solemnize a tragic occurrence, and this kind of poetry was frequent with gentlemen in the service of a noble or the king. Poetry was the chief form of 17th century theater: the vast majority of scripted plays were written in verse. Poetry was used in satires and in epics like Jean Chapelain's La Pucelle.
Although French poetry during the reign of Henri IV and Louis XIII was still largely inspired by the poets of the late Valois court, some of their excesses and poetic liberties found censure, especially in the work of François de Malherbe who criticized La Pléiade's and Philippe Desportes's irregularities of meter or form. The later 17th century would see Malherbe as the grandfather of poetic classicism.
Poetry came to be a part of the social games in noble salons, where epigrams, satirical verse, and poetic descriptions were all common. The linguistic aspects of the phenomenon associated with the "précieuses" -- the use of highly metaphorical language, the purification of socially unacceptable vocabulary—was tied to this poetic salon spirit and would have an enormous impact on French poetic and courtly language. Although "préciosité" was often mocked for its linguistic and romantic excesses, the French language and social manners of the 17th century were permanently changed by it.
From the 1660s, three poets stand out. Jean de La Fontaine gained enormous celebrity through his Aesop inspired "Fables" which were written in an irregular verse form. Jean Racine was seen as the greatest tragedy writer of his age. Finally, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux became the theorizer of poetic classicism: his "Art poétique" praised reason and logic, believability, moral usefulness and moral correctness; it elevated tragedy and the poetic epic as the great genres and recommended imitation of the poets of antiquity.
"Classicism" in poetry would dominate until the pre-romantics and the French Revolution.
From a technical point of view, the poetic production from the late 17th century on increasingly relied on stanza forms incorporating rhymed couplets, and by the 18th century fixed-form poems – and, in particular, the sonnet – were largely avoided. The resulting versification – less constrained by meter and rhyme patterns than Renaissance poetry – more closely mirrored prose.