Poèmes choisis suivis d’Études critiques by Marie Krysinska (review)

Poet, novelist, musician, and composer, Polish-born Marie Krysinksa (1857–1908) is today deemed a major figure of the literature and the cultural spirit of fin-de-siècle France. It was not, however, a recognition that she earned either in her lifetime or until more than a century after her death. Marginalized by her contemporaries, who hotly contested her claim to have invented free-verse poetry, and denigrated as a woman writer in a maledominated literary world, she slipped from view despite her early inclusion in the bohemian literary circles that famously frequented Le Chat noir in turn-of-the-century Montmartre. In his annotated edition Seth Whidden, a long-standing proponent of the poet’s literary worth, sets the record straight: his volume offers the modern reader a sample of her work that richly illustrates her creative innovativeness, feminine integrity, and theoretical beliefs. This is largely achieved by the book’s judicious, three-part arrangement: a biographical and contextual introduction by the editor; a selection of poems extracted from Krysinska’s three poetic anthologies, Rythmes pittoresques (1890), Joies errantes (1894), and Intermèdes (1903); and a range of critical writings in which the poet defends her originality and evinces her grasp of contemporary aesthetic preoccupations and debate. In his introduction Whidden aptly insists on the poetry’s thematic and formal distinctiveness. Writing at a time when the exponents of the vers libre were challenging both the Parnassian return to order and the prosodic formalities of the past, Krysinska was undeniably at their experimental forefront. Radically disencumbering herself of the old rules of rhyme and the metric structure of syllabic verse, she opts for broken lines, the expressive rhythms of the spoken language, and the musical effects of refrains, repetitions, alliteration, and assonance. The very titles of the poems and poetic sections — ‘Symphonie en gris’, ‘Chanson d’automne’, ‘Ballade’, ‘Sérénade’, etc. — intimate the inextricability of sense and sound in her work. With due respect for Krysinska’s gender, which counted against her during her day, Whidden’s choice of poems is notably weighted in favour of those that illustrate her feminine optique. Ahead of her time and eschewing the male poet’s long-standing representation of woman as Muse or passive object, she draws on myth, legend, and the Bible to reinstate women in history as active and bodily aware members of their sex. Consider the poems ‘Judith’, ‘Jeanne d’Arc’, ‘Hélène’ (of Troy), ‘Naissance d’Aphrodite’, for instance. In the final section, Krysinska’s formal and thematic daring is brought to light in a selection of her critical essays (originally journal articles or prefaces to her works). Strident, forthright, historically informed, and polemically couched, they deserve reconsideration as aesthetic manifestos born of personal conviction in a time of literary and artistic ferment. Interestingly, the edition’s closing biographical notes on the many individuals to whom Krysinska dedicated her poems present a veritable roll call of those — poets, cabaret identities, creative figures of the past — who variously influenced her work. Given its manageable format and assemblage of representative texts, the edition will delight readers and could fruitfully be used in an educational context.