Poeticized Language: The Foundations of Contemporary French Poetry by Jean-Jacques Thomas and Steven Winspur (review)

Jean-Jacques Thomas and Steven Winspur. PoeticizedLanguage: The Foundations ofContemporary French Poetry. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 279p. Catherine Perry University of Notre Dame Despite the somewhat jarring sonorities of the word "poeticized," the main title of this book appropriately describes the authors' goal. In their ambitious study Thomas and Winspur seek to present an "overview of the main tendencies in contemporary French poetry as a whole," from the First World War to the present, by accounting for individual poetic practices and linguistic experiments through "a detailed study ofspecific poems" (6). To this effect, their book covers an array of poets as varied as Apollinaire, Saint-John Perse, Tzara, Aragon, Eluard, Bonnefoy, Jacob, Ponge, Jabès, Roubaud, and the OuLiPo group, among others, while leaving out only a few prominent names, such as Claudel and Char. Aiming for cultural diversity, their book also includes the francophone poets Glissant and Césaire, as well as three women poets: Risset, Chedid, and Hébert. Approaching, let alone understanding and interpreting, contemporary poetry represents a daunting prospect for many readers of French literature. Poeticized Language sets out to overcome this resistance, arguing cogently that "readers forget that the body ofpoetry they have ignored for the most part is contemporaneous with their own culture," and that "[t]o ignore such writings is to turn the act of reading into a nostalgic look backward, rather than an understanding of the present" (7). More persuasively still, a series ofmeticulous and illuminating analyses familiarize us with the mysteries ofa poeticized French language, uncovering ways in which poems produce meaning and reveal more concealed processes at work within language itself. ReiteratingValérys characterization ofpoetry as a kind ofdancingwirh respect to the "walking" ofeveryday speech,Thomas and Winspur explain how poetry may be viewed as "a backdrop to all linguistic acts, insofar as it illustrates to the utmost degree the power oflanguage's effects" (10). It is to a voyage of discovery, then, that the authors invite us, and one could hardly wish for more adept guides than these two specialists in the field oftwentieth-century French poetry. It should be noted, however, that Poeticized Language is hardly designed to appeal to a non-specialized readership, as every chapter assumes more than a passing acquaintance with modern French poetry, and further, with structuralist and deconstructive approaches to language and literature. Who, other than a specialist , would be able to decode aword like "hypotaxis," inscribed on the second page of the introduction as though to warn off readers who may be enthusiastic but 122 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2001 Reviews insufficiently geared for the adventure? To the untrained reader, Thomas and Winspur do offer one or two pedagogical chapters—chapter six, "Image and Formula ," is a case in point—as well as helpful references, in the footnotes conveniently located at the bottom ofeach page, and particularly in the select bibliography , "limited to recent general studies," halfofwhich are in English. It is nonetheless regrettable rhat the bibliographyshould exclude such distinguished critics as John P. Houston, Mary Ann Caws, and John E. Jackson. An original feature of this book consists in its collaborative undertaking. The authors' joint efforts challenge the view that most academic studies are, and perhaps should be, produced as solitary ventures. Ifnot undertaken with the utmost caution, however, this kind ofmethodology may generate confusing statements. In their introduction, for instance, it is unclear whether or not die authors endorse what they term "the most widely recognized attribute of the French language ," namely that French, in Rousseau's words, "is hardly suited for poetry and certainly not for music" (1). Numerous examples easily disprove such a sweeping statement—one could cite Ronsard and Verlaine as musical poets writing centuries apart from one another—yet the authors' own perspective remains ambiguous . At times, theyseem to concede the inherently poetic character ofworks written prior to the late nineteendi century, admitting that not all pre-modernist poets had lost track of"the underlying causes" (3) ofthe "formal apparatus ofverse and rhyme" (2), and that "poets from Apollinaire onward have 'poeticized' even further the language ofliterature that was handed down to them" (8). At other times, they appear to believe that...