Poem translated into European languages

Concerning Europe and the countries which compose it, the literature is rich and I would like to speak here about poetry.

Poetry comes from the Greek and means "creation". The poet first called, aed, singer, is considered as a creator, the artist "par excellence", because he invents in the same time the language, its rhytm and its figures, and the object of the language, that must preserve the architecture of the poem. To the notion of poetry is first linked that of versification, of prosody by which the common origin with music is asserted.

The verse measure is not always a characteristic of poetry, as the free verse shows, and prose can be called poetic (the poem in prose).

Diomedes divid poetry into three categories: an epic poetry, which relates history and legends, in which the author and the characters speak; A dramatic poetry in which only the characters speak; A lyrical poetry which is an immediate expression of feelings. Goethe propose more simply to distinguish clearly poetry of emotion, and that of the subjective.

These divisions can be associated with temporal shifts: lyric-present, epic-past, dramatic-future, with an attitude to the real: grasping (lyrical), overview (epic), tension (dramatic). To affirm that lyricism constitutes the essence of poetry is to define a reading effect by which the Eneid, the Contemplations, the Divine Comedy and Alcohols belong to the same mode of expression, but exclude, for example, the philosophical poems of Voltaire and Pope.

There is in the heart of poetry a specific attitude in front of language and world. The singularity of the poetic state, which Rimbaud defines as "the absence of descriptive or instructive faculties", is only a way of designating the one who "Strives to hear by being heard with originality".

For Plato, the poetic state is related to enthusiasm, to divine possession: "the poet is winged and sacred," and he can not create before feeling inspiration, being out of himself and losing The use of reason. "The poem is analogous to the oracle": a god dictation. In the bible universe, the poet is the prophet, for the philosophers of India, poetry, joins the contemplation of the wise : the poet receives by the grace of Sarasvati, the revelation of the word. This thesis commands many poetics, from the romantic epoch to the Abbe Bremond. The reference to God makes poetry an absolute speech.

The poem, in the peculiarity of its expression, calls marks and measures, they are not just conventions, but this rhythmic is an harmony between the singular and the universal. For Aristotle, poetry of any kind belongs to the arts of imitation. If he proceeds by narrative, the poet has as domain the possible, imitated from reality according to plausibility and logical necessity. Aristotelian theory, by making the poetic "beautiful" an ornament and a generalization of truth, inspired classical aesthetics.

Horace brings poetry closer to painting, for Boileau it is a rational activity. Baudelaire does not deny either the lucidity nor the work of writing. In modern creation, the word in itself is an absolute, because it is at the same time the prose of the world and the prose of the being. This can be seen in St John Perse and Apollinaire. Poetry is both on the side of speech and this of writing, on the side of the narrative and on this of the poem. It is a "first grammar" that leads words into a dance that marks the effort to free oneself from the alienations of things and words: it tries to be an instantaneous. The snapshot can be active: the spontaneity of the automatic writing, of dada. Poetry can be brought back to the side of the voice because every word is instantaneous.

The indiscipline of poetry attests to its power to transgress literature and to mark the essential tolerance of writing. This tolerance defines the metaphysical property of poetry, it makes language as "the habitat of man adequate to the habitat of the world" (Heidegger). This coalescence, which renders the word suited to measure and disproportion, to the notation of the local and to that of the universal, today identifies the absolute value of poetry. This absolute can find an explicit expression (Nerval and surrealist), when the language ceases to be a language instrument it touches the inmost of everything.

For Hugo the poet is a mage. Poetry is the only mode of literary expression which does not need legitimation because it harbors, in its use of language, a way of ubiquity which is a knowledge of the world. This centralization of language can take various forms: the symbolism of Baudelaire, the asceticism of Mallarme, the timelessness of Pound, the rationality of Boileau or that of the contemporary deconstruction.