Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre (review)

A book echoing across the ages with the voiceprint of Homer, one possessing the qualities of prose and poetry was bound to be a popular phenomenon. Such was the case at the end of the seventeenth century when François Fénelon wrote his didactic Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699). A logical sequel to the Iliad and Odyssey, but instead of imitating Homer’s epic rhythmic scheme Fénelon chose to write in prose, the style most apt to impress a teenage heir to the throne – his student, the Duke of Burgundy. Is it a prose poem? Commentators have referred to its “style of poetry” (1), its “epic style” (31) and its prose poem-like “dual identity” (50). Voltaire designated it a “moral novel” rather than a “poem” (87). Otherwise the work’s length of several hundred pages denies it the label of “poème en prose,” while affirming that of “prose poétique.”

Fabienne Moore cites Fénelon’s work as a progenitor in the evolution of the prose poem. Prose poetry must, as its oxymoronic title implies, tell as does prose yet suggest as would poetry. Is there a difference between prose poems and prose poetry? Moore and other scholars make that distinction (6). Specialists in prose poetry Suzanne Bernard, Patrick Labarthe, Yves Vadé among them, attribute the debut of prose poems in France to Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842). This collection of enigmatic poems is cited by Baudelaire (1861) as inspiration for his own forays into the genre and he is in turn deemed to be the first widely read prose poet. In Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre, Moore looks further back and multiplies substantially the opportunities for provocative readings from canonical authors such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and Chateaubriand and less frequented ones from the likes of Houdar de La Motte, Évariste Parny and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, all convened via the concept of the prose poem.

Moore redirects definition, usually mired in semantic play, and aspires to “bring aesthetic diversity to a field arbitrarily dominated by novels and theater” (6). Although her citation refers most directly to the advent of the novel in the 1600s, to progress of the theatre in the 1700’s and their consequent contributions to prose poetry, here she also provides an artistic clue to the destination in store for the reader of her thesis.

A clear introduction lays out the book’s seven chapters. Fénelon’s Télémaque provoked discussion about prose and poetry even as its pedagogical content raised eyebrows within the monarchy. When Télémaque was warned by Mentor not to let his passions overcome his duty to find his father, Fénelon may have been criticizing members of Louis xiv’s entourage for an excess of passion. Were Fénelon’s ideas bold enough to set off new and perhaps revolutionary thinking or were they more simply reflections of the political environment? A quarter-century later Montesquieu, in one of his less conventional works—Le Temple de Gnide—replicated in a short-story format many of Télémaque’s motifs. Both works were placed in the classical Greek era replete with pastoral settings and populated by various gods, goddesses and nymphs. Though veiled in bucolic garb Montesquieu reiterates Fénelon’s askant take on the court’s philosophy of pleasure.

Moore delves into early influences on prose poetry that have heretofore been little explored. “Les Belles infidèles”—translations into French prose of foreign poetry as well as the ascendence of the novel shook the foundations of rhyme as a requisite for poetry or theatre. Some authors argued for tradition while others argued for change. Fontenelle petitioned for more prose acceptance. Voltaire spoke against the demise of rhyme. Houdar de La Motte attacked the value of rhyme and the “tyranny” of verse. Abbé Fraguier argued passionately for the preservation of discrete categories poem and prose. Across the eighteenth century a...