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Planetary Motions
, published by Giant Steps Press, is now available on Amazon for $14.95.



Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems
is available for $16.00 from FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona NY 14856 or see www.foothillspublishing.com.

Tourist Snapshots was available from Randy Fingland's CC Marimbo, P.O. Box 933, Berkeley CA. CC Marimbo has, unfortunately ceased publishing, though I still have a few copies to spare.

Dada Poetry: An Introduction was published by Nirala Publications. It may be ordered on Amazon.com for $29.99 plus shipping. American buyers may order a copy from me for $23 including shipping.

Each book is available from the author William Seaton. Write seaton@frontiernet.net.


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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

The Appeal of Indeterminacy in the Corpus Christi Carol

 

I append the text of the carol in the form printed in Greene’s anthology A Selection of English Carols.  This is the same version recorded in Richard Hill’s early sixteenth century commonplace book.

  

     Whereas non-aesthetic discourse most often aims at clarity and monosemy, poetry commonly cultivates multiple meanings and, in some cases, glories in obscurity.  Cultivated at times by the Troubadours of trobar clus and the French Symbolists, indeterminate meaning plays a role in all aesthetic texts. In the “Corpus Christi Carol” semantic uncertainty is foregrounded.  R. L. Greene, the editor of the Oxford book of carols noted of it "This carol has been subject to more discussion than any other in the whole canon." [1]  It is hardly necessary to review the scholarly literature to come to this conclusion.  Virtually all who comment on the poem describe it as enigmatic and mysterious, and critics generally make the observation in an appreciative tone.  

     Shorn of allusive associations, the Corpus Christi Carol sketches a melancholy scene portraying types of human suffering.  The chorus, to be sung with each verse, opens with the standard baby-soothing line “lully, lullay” (the source of the word “lullaby”), though no infant is to appear.  Instead the soothing, satisfied sound of the first line is succeeded by a harsh plaint over lost love: “The faucon hath borne my make away.”  The sense of loss and longing is then suddenly transferred to a mysterious tableau: in a hall there is a bed upon which a knight lies bleeding while a woman kneeling at his bedside weeps for him.  It is unclear what relation this pair might have to the persona whose lover had been carried away.  On the poems’ purely emotional register the potential joy of a child evoked in the first line is interrupted, overturned even, by suffering such as love-longing and the pains of mortality both for the dying and for those whom survive.  As such the poem achieves a grand sort of pathos with its elegantly understated yet powerfully suggestive image.  Anyone might be either the suffering knight or the grieving maiden and indeed everyone is both.

     The song, however, concludes with a final couplet which, though it adds what looks like definitive information, in fact only complicates the interpretive challenges of the poem as a whole.  

 

    And by that beddes side ther standeth a stoon: 
    Corpus Christi writen theron.

 One might suspect that the explicit Christianity of this conclusion might privilege a reading of the poem as straightforward orthodox piety.  Christ is then figured in the bleeding knight, [2] while the “may” in mourning is Mary.  The nonsense syllables of the chorus “lully, lullay” associate the implied dramatic moment with Christmas (rather than the summertime Corpus Christi) at the outset.  The virgin is rocking the baby Jesus while envisioning the passion with which his life must end.  To some the image signifies not the body of Christ per se but rather the presence of Christ in the eucharistic bread “bleeding” from being dipped in wine.  Of course, the host (derived from hostia = sacrificial victim) is symbolically identical to Christ.

     As though in a palimpsest, behind the Christian images of the song are discernable the patterns of the Fisher King and the Grail Legend, themselves ultimately derived from Celtic mythology.  Meaning has drifted and eroded during the centuries-long transmission of these stories through the adoption of Christianity and the leading actors’ demotion from deities to heroes to supporting actors in a Christian story.  This semantic evolution has caused the Grail theme to acquire a reputation – well-justified in many cases including the Corpus Christi Carol -- for haunting mystery.  The elliptical narrative and the grandly portentous atmosphere of spirituality suggest the aesthetic occult, like Masonic paraphernalia. 

     In R. L. Greene’s ingenious historical interpretation [2] the associations with the Eucharist are the basis for the argument that the carol is a partisan song in which Catherine of Aragon laments the accession of Anne Boleyn and the introduction of the Anglican Church.  Whether this reflects an early sixteenth century understanding is irrelevant to the poem’s reception by most modern readers. 

     The ambiguities are part of the design of the text as it exists today, some the result of the evolution from earlier forms, some as elements of theme, some for style.  The identity of the speaker who has lost a mate is unclear.  Why is the orchard brown?  Why is the knight bleeding?  What is the relation of the knight and the grieving lady?  Many readers have suspected that the final line mentioning Corpus Christi is a late addition aimed at establishing the poem’s orthodoxy.  To what extent does it suggest a Christian antidote to suffering?  And what else might bring an end to the sadness?  How could the speaker regain a lover?  Why does the tense change from past to present continuous with the line “And in that bed ther lith a knight”?

     The effect of this catalogue of questions, which might be might be lengthened almost indefinitely, pointing in a variety of hermeneutic directions, is most prominently to convey a tone of haunting mystery.  As the practice of cults has shown from Pythagoreans and Orphic initiates to Theosophists and present-day adherents of QAnon, the very uncertainty of interpretation enhances a sense of deep if unfathomable significance.   Rather like a grand passage of Beethoven it seems to convey meaning beyond words, but nonetheless of vital importance. 

     The indeterminate meaning has at least one clear implication: there is much we do not know.  If nothing else, the mysterious scene the poem sketches for its hearers represents the ineffable spectacle of that most familiar and unknown of things, everyday reality.  The echoes of Celtic and Christian myth agree in their fundamental paradigm: each presents a convincing picture of a world of suffering familiar to all, embodied in the Fisher King’s wounded father, the bleeding knight and in Christ on the cross.  Each offer as well a solution, figured in Bran’s magic cauldron, the gallantry of Percival and Galahad, the divine person of Jesus, and the eucharistic host in which the god lurks.

     Yet why is the knight suffering?  We know no answer, just as we are baffled by the origin and the meaning of the Holocaust or of our myriad pettier complaints.  What is the outcome for the knight and maid?  For the reader?  Who can say?  A more determinate theme would be a false one.  It is the reader’s own nescience about everyday life reflected on the page and colored with the resonance of the deepest human emotions, given comely form and the pleasing accompaniment of sweet music.  Yet in the end the grace of the poem, the beauty of its melody, seems redemptive, the composed response soothing all souls.  Everyone is the infant being lulled to rest, “lully, lullay.”  If we have nothing else, we have yet beauty.  Here is the source of the song’s charm. 


 

1.     1.  Richard Greene, editor, A Selection of English Carols, Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1962, 230.  Significant variations including additions occur in later versions, including the addition of a thorn at the foot of the bed and a hound lapping the C.  Benjamin Britten’s setting is often featured in holiday concerts.

2.      2.  See R. L. Greene, “The Meaning of the Corpus Christi Carol,” Medium Aevum 29 (1960): 10–21.

3.      3.  Christ is often depicted as a knight in medieval art and literature, in, for instance, the Ancrene Riwle, William Herebert, and Piers Ploughman.  Ephesians 6:13-16 describes the arming of God’s soldier.

 

 

 Lully, lullay, lully, lullay,
The faucon hath borne my make away.
 
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown.
 
In that orchard ther was an hall
That was hanged with purple and pall.
 
And in that hall there was a bed:
It was hanged with gold so red.
 
And in that bed ther lith a knight,
His woundes bleeding by day and night.
 
By that beddes side ther kneeleth a may,
And she weepeth both night and day.
 
And by that beddes side ther standeth a stoon:
Corpus Christi writen theron.

Poems from Planetary Motions

  

 I post primarily prose here, but this month I mark the publication of Planetary Motions by offering a poem from each of the book’s sections along with a few brief and, I trust, superfluous, comments.  For further information, see the listing on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Planetary-Motions-William-Seaton/dp/B08MS5KNJB/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ASZSKJYZS5VG&dchild=1&keywords=planetary+motions&qid=1606054981&sprefix=planetary+mo%2Caps%2C214&sr=8-1

 

 

  • 1.      Other Scenes

 

 

                        Dia de los Muertos

          On Dia de los Muertos some here choose

          to picnic with their loved ones by their graves,

          and some then strive with Gallo beer to kill

          mosquitoes of the mind that can draw blood.

          Out front a wobbly Rambo sheds his shirt

          and dares the other men to come and fight.

          In corners of red eyes I see bright tears.

          Thin dogs with hanging dugs pace back and forth.

          Their glance tells me there's nothing more to say.

 

 

This is Guatemala where Gallo is best-known as a beer (not wine) brand.  The nervous scroungy free-running dogs of developing countries well suggest the tone of life in poor neighborhoods.  In this setting the universal theme of mortality is colored by the traveler’s knowledge of pre-Columbian human sacrifice, brutal colonialism, and the barbaric violence of decades-long civil unrest. 

 

 

 

  • 2.      Divagations

 

 

I hurtle through the light and dark by trees

that reach and strive indifferent to my course,

by rocks with memories back before the flood,

each facet marking some old painful break,

eruption, gash, reshuffle. Read there, see

tomorrow far more live and clear

than ever sortilege, astrology,

or hepatoscopy could claim: beat grass

and withered weeds, a sudden bird, and wind

that envies leaves of shrubs and, homeless, sighs. 

 

 

I meant to suggest that the most common sights are surely more beautiful, remarkable, and significant than divination or magic.  The scene before the eyes is always a gaze at the morphing flow of phenomena.  Sometimes even the wise wind sounds sad.

 

 

 

  • 3.      Appetites

 

Feast

 

O be for me an oyster raw,

unfathomable: inside the shell

a lopped but answering tongue,

and be for me an onion soup,

so thick and savory-sweet.

O be for me a leg of lamb,

as rich and strong as scrubby hills,

and be for me a Brussels sprout,

compact and layered like a late quartet.

O surely you’re my bread

and fit me like inhaled air.

Do be for me tonight a custard flan

so melting to the tongue

               with caramel atop

it brings an end to words.

 

 

Or as Bessie Smith sang, “Give me lots of candy, honey, love is grand.”

 

 

  • 4.      Songs

 

 

Yearly the killer bees yaw and romp

through the golden filigree of printemps.

Like opals and carbuncles dewy and light

that ravish the soul at the very first sight,

confusing their victims, occluding their might.

Soon their prey will sink in a swoon.

These oligolectic bees buzz up a tune

of garnet greens and things unseen,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes.

 

 

My goal in these songs is to turn the focus from content to the melody of words, a quality often neglected in contemporary poetry.  I think of Keats describing Negative Capability, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  In another letter he spoke of “the 'burden of the Mystery.'”  Just listen; no understanding needed.

 

 

 

  • 5.      Momento Mori

 

 

Dead trees in the forked arms

of their fellows that followed,

knot-eyes wide with utter unbelief

like comrades in war unable

to believe their trench-mates gone.

The forest floor has generations

layered like old Troy, but back and back

to time’s get-go and each supports

the next till in the ultimate sub-basement

the elevator operator lifts one wry eye,

the door slides, the secret’s out

and all distinctions fade.

Then everything relaxes, all lets go,

no longer any gap from one to one,

the manic dance may pause --

so brief! -- between exhale/inhale,

before time’s arrow like

some god of locomotives,

blows a lonely whistle

and speeds on down the line

as though the terminus

               must hold that counter

where one can sit

               and ask one’s heart’s desire --

so well worth racing toward!

 

 

In what I like to think is a reinforcement of theme, several of the images here are fading from the general imagination.  The locomotive had more powerful associations in the era of steam, and elevator operators are now rare birds, building a muted strain of nostalgia into the story. 

 

 

  • 6.      Lama Swine Toil

 

 

The Lama’s Parable of the Not-OK Corral              

              

He walked the dusty, sun-baked streets of a town

on the far frontier of metaphysics.

His faithful Indian companion whispered sutras in his ear.

The townspeople hustled off to shelter behind the nearest

received ideas.

The tumbleweeds blew, and the buzzards cried out wise

suggestions,

but he never heard and just stared straight ahead.

At the street’s opposite end, walking slowly toward him, was his

enemy,

his brother, his mirror-image.

(And the town’s pretty schoolmarm walked an identical street

at that very moment, facing a Doppelgänger of her own,

her foot like his poised seeking the next step,

and neither could help it at all.)

The sweat dripped down his cheek.

The Avidya Boys, he knew, were crouching in doorways,

leaning from second-story windows,

and the gang from the Hungry Ghost Ranch,

covered him from every angle.

The clock ticked on toward the highest of high noons

when time, that old codger, will expire, as did Gabby Hayes in

1969. 

Suddenly he heard from behind the voice of the cosmos, deep

and unmistakable,

“Drop your ego on the ground right there, I’ve got you

covered.”

And he knew the jig was finally up.

 

 

 

Another apocalyptic anticipation like the last, here employing the “Old West” set that once proved hospitable to many of this country’s myths, a redeemed Spahn Movie Ranch of the mind, maybe, artificial, playful and beneficent. 

 

 

  • 7.      Translations

 

 

Horace, Odes I, 11

 

Don’t ask, Leukonoe, it is taboo to know

what fate I’ve got and what’s awaiting you.

Forget the Tarot reader. It is best to tough

it out. Know Jupiter may give us many years

or this may be the last we see the Tuscan sea

come break against the rocks. Be wise; strain wine;

don’t hold great long-term hopes. We talk and jealous time

runs on. Just seize this day, think nothing of the next.

 

It is almost the last shred of the once-sizable fund of Horatian maxims that all educated European people used to carry about – carpe diem.  Ecclesiastes said the same.  Horace is one of the greatest of poets, though I fear he loses a very great deal in translation.

 

 


MorĂ©as’ Symbolism

 

Translations from MorĂ©as are my own.  See endnotes for the original French.

 

     Like most of the manifestoes written during the great procession of modern art movements, Jean MorĂ©as’ “Le Symbolisme” [1] is stronger when treated as an imaginative text than as a theoretical statement.  There was no stable and organized Symbolist group though MorĂ©as did publish a short-lived journal called Le Symboliste; some of his ideas were shared with others often identified as Symbolists, others are his alone.  Indeed, the essay imagines Symbolism as not quite realized.  “the Supreme Enchantment has not yet come: a stubborn and jealous job of work awaits newcomers.” [2]  Far from setting out a coherent program, the essay sails on the high winds of the author’s animated spirits, charged with polemical energy, expressing total confidence against the background of a dazzling display of pyrotechnic rhetoric. 

     MorĂ©as opens with an idea that implies no stable set of literary recommendations.  He proposes a cyclic and organic concept of art in which each movement is born, ages, and then declines as the next arises. [3]  The sole imperative is that proclaimed by Ezra Pound: “Make it new.” [4]  Culture follows an inexorable recurring pattern in which “that which had been novel and spontaneous turns cliched and commonplace.”  Thus “after the classical clichĂ©, there came the romantic clichĂ©.” [5] 

     Such ideas are widespread – one thinks of the neoterics of the first century C. E. or Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Nova Poetria of the early thirteenth, but they are hardly universal.  Defenders of imitation of the masters and strict adherence to convention are always available to assert an opposite tendency, thus creating a dynamic tension on both sides.  In “Le Symbolisme” this role is filled by the Intermezzo character called “un dĂ©tracteur” who is prone to such utterances as “but the caesura, the caesura! They violate the caesura!!” and “Horrors!  Not to respect the alternation of rhymes!” [6] 

     MorĂ©as proceeds to the alternatives to Symbolism as the mode of the coming generation.   He concedes Naturalism a certain value as novelty as a counterweight to the banality of a Romanticism “sunk in senility.”  Such innovation, while “legitimate” is “ill-considered” and “naĂŻve.”  “One can,” he sniffs, “only seriously value the work of the Naturalist writer as a cry of protest.” [7]  The basis for his reaction against Naturalism is his rejection of the Platonic concept of art as imitation.  According to MorĂ©as, his “simple and exceedingly succinct point of departure” is the principle that “art cannot be faithful to the objective”.  [8]  There could scarcely be a more energetic challenge to any realistic style that aims at imitating lived experience.  While language cannot reproduce reality for MorĂ©as, it can reflect subjectivity.

     Another competitor for the leading role in art is the school identified as Decadent.  Having asserted that impressions are all that exist, it is unsurprising that MorĂ©as’ strictures on the Decadents are unashamedly subjective.  Such writers are “tough and stringy” like an ill-prepared beefsteak, as well as “frightened and groveling” like despicable weaklings. [9]  The reader can only speculate about just what he means.  There is little clue to the specific characteristics of the Decadent group or to MorĂ©as’ objections, but it makes for lively reading. 

     He does propose Symbolism as the “reasonable” alternative corresponding to “the actual spirit of the creator in art” [10], and he does sketch out some characteristics of the sort of new writing he would approve.  He energetically defends obscurity and ambiguity and declares Symbolism the “enemy of didacticism, declamation, false sensibility, and,” MorĂ©as concludes climactically, “objective description.”  He declares that “the essential character of symbolist art consists in never aiming at the conception of the idea in itself,” but rather in assuring that the idea “never lets itself be seen without the sumptuous gowns of extraneous associations.” [11]  A certain extravagance is implied by the adjectives “sumptuous” and “extraneous.”  The delight in verbal collage, in resonant if in part arbitrary and improvisatory imagery, is implied by the sentiment and reinforced by the out-of-the-way choice of “simarre” rather than “manteau” or “robe” for “gown.”  The Symbolist will make use of “perceivable appearances” not to reconstruct reality on the page, but to suggest “esoteric affinities with primordial ideas,” [12] though just what those ideas are remains intentionally enigmatic.

     MorĂ©as offers to provide an “exact translation“ of just what his theory means in  practice: “unpolluted words,” “arching and periodic phrases intermixed with waves of its absence,” “meaningful pleonasms,” “mysterious omissions,” “anaculothia held in suspense,” indeed “all bold and polysemous tropes.”  His emphasis here, far from prescribing a particular style, is to endorse enthusiasm and showy rhetoric.  The passage itself goes on to recommend language that is “good and luxuriant and frisky” and ends with a delicious and gratuitous reference to certain archers of antiquity: “free writers who let fly their barbed language much like the sinuous arrows of the Toxotes of Thrace.” [10]  

          MorĂ©as lets the cat altogether out of the bag eventually when he imagines this art of the future inn this bravura passage, replete like Rabelais’ catalogues, as decadent as Huysmans on Silver Latin, as crankishly bookish as Baron Corvo.

 

At times mythic phantasms are evoked from old Demogorgon to Belial, from the Cabeiris to the nigromantes [necromancers] lavishly turned out on Caliban’s rock or by Titania’s forest to the mixolydian music of barbitons and octochords. [11]

 

One could disentangle some of the elements so gleefully thrown together here beginning perhaps with the echoes of the demiurge in neo-Platonism, Spenser, and Shelley (who associated it with the French Revolution).  The reader, though, has hardly a moment to consider before this initial figure is succeeded by another and then another.  After half a dozen allusions, MorĂ©as concludes the display with three rare ancient Greek words. 

     Surely this is recreational language, meant less to be understood than to create a tone, a mood, a curious symbolic pattern that involves the reader in an experience rather than inviting exegesis.  Far from a meticulous structure where every mot is juste, this is a bricolage, looking as though it has been constructed from whatever happened to be at hand.   

     Summing up the characteristics of Symbolist writing, MorĂ©as notes, “The very truth of lyric poetry is found in seeming disorder, luminous madness, and passionate grandiloquence.”  He advocates running the risk of an “excess of rhetorical figures and colorful expressions.” [12] 

     With such energy and improvisatory enthusiasm, MorĂ©as’ reader feels at some distance from the Symbolism of MallarmĂ© and ValĂ©ry whose magisterial, even still-Parnassian, tone suggested a cool composure as opposed to MorĂ©as’ excitement.  Their thoughtful lexical precision contrasts with his eruptions of exuberant words.  Though MorĂ©as insisted that his images would aim at “primordial ideas,” in practice he cares little for such moorings, letting his words float freely like a skyful of clouds. While both MallarmĂ© and ValĂ©ry stuck to alexandrines and sonnets until the very end, MorĂ©as recommended a looser prosody which in his description sounds rather like syncopated jazz.  “An alexandrine with multiple and mobile caesurae, the primary task of certain numbers -- seven, nine, eleven, thirteen – resolute in many rhythmic permutations of which they are the sum.” 

     MorĂ©as then might be considered less as the inspiration of the French poets generally identified as Symbolist and of their American cousins Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, perhaps in more recent years, than he is of freer word-slinging rhetoricians from Apollinaire to Gregory Corso.  Though MorĂ©as had posed as the herald of the new Symbolist movement, a few years later he had changed direction and began to advocate neo-Classicism,  the “Ă©cole romane,” a taste that persisted to the end of the poet’s life.   This group became associated with nationalism, reactionary views, anti-Semitism, and, through Maurras, the formation of the fascist Action Française.  In this way a writer who had been a young radical came in time to be a monarchist, a writer who had shouted for novelty came to idealize past masters, and a rebel became a defender of privilege.  The scheme of generational evolution MorĂ©as had outlined gained, at least in his own case, a sort of ironic truth as he abandoned the provocative and exhilarating coruscations of “Le Symbolisme.

 

  

1.      Published in Le Figaro for December 18, 1886.  A twenty-first century American can only feel nostalgia for those long-ago days when a newspaper of general circulation would publish aesthetic polemics and people would discuss such issues in the cafes.

 

2.      Cependant le SuprĂŞme Enchantement n'est pas encore consommĂ© : un labeur opiniâtre et jaloux sollicite les nouveaux venus.”  The extravagance of the capitalized “Supreme Enchantment” is a giveaway of the self-indulgences to come.

 

3.      Darwin was surely an influence in MorĂ©as’ time.  Similar ideas have been advanced by Vico in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth by Harold Bloom with the addition of an overlay of neurotic guilt in descriptions of the “anxiety of influence.” 

 

4.     Make it New was the title of Pound’s 1934 book of essays, but he had earlier used the phrase, in fact a translation of M. G. Pauthier’s French version of the Chinese, in his 1928 translation of the Confucian text he titled Ta Hio: The Great Learning.  

 

5.      ce qui fut le neuf et le spontanĂ© devient le poncif et le lieu-commun.” “et qu'après les poncifs classiques, il y a eu des poncifs romantiques.”

 

6.      In the original “Mais la cĂ©sure, la cĂ©sure! On viole la cĂ©sure!!” and “Horreur! Ne pas respecter l'alternance des rimes!

 

7.      In the French “tombĂ© en enfance,” “lĂ©gitime mais mal avisĂ©e,” “la mĂ©thode puĂ©rile du naturalisme,” “on ne peut accorder sĂ©rieusement qu'une valeur de protestation.”  MorĂ©as exempts Zola who was miraculously “saved by his wonderful writer’s instinct” (“sauvĂ© par un merveilleux instinct d'Ă©crivain”).

 

8.      In the original “un simple point de dĂ©part extrĂŞmement succinct”  “l'art ne saurait chercher en l'objectif.”

 

9.      Les littĂ©ratures dĂ©cadentes se rĂ©vèlent essentiellement coriaces, filandreuses, timorĂ©es et serviles.”

 

10.   Nous avons dĂ©jĂ  proposĂ© la dĂ©nomination de Symbolisme comme la seule capable de dĂ©signer raisonnablement la tendance actuelle de l'esprit crĂ©ateur en art.”

 

11.   ennemie de "l'enseignement, la dĂ©clamation, la fausse sensibilitĂ©, la description objective" “le caractère essentiel de l'art symbolique consiste Ă  ne jamais aller jusqu'Ă  la conception de l'IdĂ©e en soi.” “L'IdĂ©e, Ă  son tour, ne doit point se laisser voir privĂ©e des somptueuses simarres des analogies extĂ©rieures.”

 

12.   des apparences sensibles destinĂ©es Ă  reprĂ©senter leurs affinitĂ©s Ă©sotĂ©riques avec des IdĂ©es primordiales

 

13.   I left “sinueuse” as “sinuous” to preserve its oddity.  The entire passage in French: Pour la traduction exacte de sa synthèse, il faut au symbolisme un style archĂ©type et complexe : d'impolluĂ©s vocables, la pĂ©riode qui s'arcboute alternant avec la pĂ©riode aux dĂ©faillances ondulĂ©es, les plĂ©onasmes significatifs, les mystĂ©rieuses ellipses, l'anacoluthe en suspens, tout trope hardi et multiforme ; enfin la bonne langue – instaurĂ©e et modernisĂ©e – la bonne et luxuriante et fringante langue française d'avant les Vaugelas et les Boileau-DesprĂ©aux, la langue de François Rabelais et de Philippe de Commines, de Villon, de RutebĹ“uf et de tant d'autres Ă©crivains libres et dardant le terme acut du langage, tels des toxotes de Thrace leurs flèches sinueuses.

 

14.   “TantĂ´t de mythiques phantasmes Ă©voquĂ©s, depuis l'antique DĂ©mogorgĂ´n jusques Ă  BĂ©lial, depuis les Kabires jusques aux Nigromans, apparaissent fastueusement atournĂ©s sur le roc de Caliban ou par la forĂŞt de Titania aux modes mixolydiens des barbitons et des octocordes.”

 

15.   “Le dĂ©sordre apparent, la dĂ©mence Ă©clatante, l'emphase passionnĂ©e sont la vĂ©ritĂ© mĂŞme de la poĂ©sie lyrique. Tomber dans l'excès des figures et de la couleur, le mal n'est pas grand et ce n'est pas par lĂ  que pĂ©rira notre littĂ©rature.”   

 

16.   l'alexandrin Ă  arrĂŞts multiples et mobiles ; l'emploi de certains nombres premiers – sept, neuf, onze, treize – rĂ©solus en les diverses combinaisons rythmiques dont ils sont les sommes.es sommes.