What poetry does

Le Regard Libre N° 54 - Giovanni F. Ryffel

Modern poetry. Incomprehensible? What if a one-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old author gave us the opportunity to receive the gifts extended by Baudelaire or Bonnefoy? Here are some thoughts on the meaning of the poetic word, based on Augustine of Hippo.

During the nineteenth^th and even more so during the twentieth century^th In the 21st century, European poetry has become increasingly inaccessible, according to some. How can we resist this judgment when we find ourselves completely disarmed before the verses of an Apollinaire, a Rilke or an Ungaretti? Not to mention their successors and ultra-contemporaries: those who are writing right now. Who are they writing for, given that they have earned the appellation of hermetic and that they themselves have sometimes attributed this proud, supposedly quasi-mystical category to themselves?

An all-powerful word?

From Romanticism onwards, in the 19th^th In the 19th century, poetry began to think about its role and meaning in a different way to anything that had gone before. It was at this point that some painters claimed the mantra of «art for art's sake». From Homer to Romanticism, poetry has always been the servant of something. Some have dared to say that it is useless? Wrong, because it was a means: its form was designed to convey content. And who wouldn't recognize that’In Praise of the Rose written by Ovid or Le Tasse celebrate the beauty of the flower far more than our simple, albeit authentic, «c'est beau» - when it's not a banal and hollow «c'est cool»?

Well, the English and German Romantics asserted that poetry was first and foremost a form of expression. creation. We know to what extent Novalis was influenced by Fichte's philosophy, in which the subject is a creator in his own way. Poetry at this time cries out its strength: the imagination can touch the abysses that lie within the soul, through imagination and sensitive evocation. Later, Baudelaire and Rimbaud would open the door to almost magical conceptions of poetry. It creates links that allow us to see a reordered reality, in a true vision, hidden behind the clatter we're used to.

In Baudelaire, the poet is almost a magician; in Rimbaud, he's a prophet. He has a way of arranging words to create new horizons, giving flavor to colors and finding «shadow gulfs» in Vowels. In this age of art for art's sake, poetry can be proud of having shed its status as a «form» of content, a pure «means of expression». It has become a mystical science, an alchemy that makes real discoveries in the mysterious backwaters of meaning and the ultra-rational.

Modern poetry thus became incomprehensible because it sought to express the inexpressible; it tried to detect the mysteries of the soul that can only be perceived by colliding our rational categories, which anchor us to a world of pragmatic banalities. And the poetry of the XX^th century is heir to this language, for it was magnificently adapted to try and express the unspeakable tragedy of war, as well as the loss of meaning due to the death of God and the fragmentation of truth by the consumerist world: where everyone is right, where what counts is that everyone expresses themselves, even if it means having nothing to say, because the total individual can have no master. And yet this is where we have discovered excellent poets like Yves Bonnefoy and Mario Luzi, who have taught us to be more human in an age of all-powerful technology and the crumbling of language, which mirrors the crumbling of «meaning».

Read also: The frustration machine

Baudelaire's magic turned out to be false, and yet his poetic language bore immense fruit. How can we explain it? We no longer believe in the Rimbaudian prophet, or even that his poetry can open up new worlds, and yet the experience of his Illuminations remains unique. What should we do with it?

The miserable word

Augustine of Hippo, more widely known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most brilliant writers of late antiquity to understand the question of language. Augustine was the first to realize that the key to understanding language was not to rely on names or terms taken singularly. The philosophers of his day, and even today's common sense, believed that language consisted above all in its "nouns". words. Augustine had the merit of understanding that the central question was that of the meaning and functioning of language - and these are made up of «signs». Language is indeed a highly complex system of signs. But it's far richer and more alive than a simple code for expressing oneself or communicating information.

In an enlightening little book entitled The Master, which features a dialogue between Augustine and his son Adéodate, is all about language. Augustine asks his son how a teacher should go about teaching, and there's no doubt that he must use language. Yet it is not language itself that teaches. Words would have no meaning if our parents hadn't first shown us the things to which the words they used corresponded, and if experience hadn't subsequently taught us the right way to arrange words into sentences and sentences into discourse, according to necessity, education, good credentials, linguistic registers and a whole complexity of factors difficult to summarize.

We've learned to speak because we've been told to. It's a rather banal observation... and yet! It gives Augustine the opportunity to deduce a great discovery: language is really a matter of signs. Because when we say «indicate», we mean «sign». And just as the link between words and reality was «indicated» on the one hand, so it is words, now that we communicate, that signal towards their meanings and, by organizing themselves into a complex network of relationships of meaning, make language possible.

And so the disciplines of semantics and semiotics were born. But so dies the possibility of believing that poetry, even through the most surprising feats of language, creates or discovers anything! Is poetic speech merely a refined play on words? Saint Augustine reveals why language works and, at the same time, seems to disenchant the world. This system of signs seems so arid. Words are inert. They can do nothing on their own, evoke nothing, change nothing... In the end, is speech so miserable?

The paradox of interiority

We know from experience that poetry is more than just a play on words. It can brighten a moment, bequeath a secret of wisdom, suggest an elsewhere we need to breathe mentally, strengthen our freedom... oh so many other things even more important and so impossible to say! No, poetry is more than a hollow embellishment. How can we understand this? The right way is not to deny Augustine's discoveries, but to take them to their logical conclusion. For if language is not capable of producing new knowledge on its own, i.e., it is not enough to mix words to invent concepts or create images, it is nevertheless true that its weakness is itself a sign of something.

The human being thirsts for truth and to discover the meaning of things. The sheer paucity of human language, unable to satisfy this need for total discovery, then beckons, by absence, in an even more heart-rending way towards the knowledge we crave. And Augustine's answer is that we find knowledge within ourselves. Words depend on reality to perform their function of indicating things. But it's obvious that they function thanks to our memory, since without it we'd always have to speak in the presence of what we want to say in order to indicate it (or drawings), and language would then have no chance of being useful or, therefore, of developing.

So, every time we speak, our memory is engaged by the words to deliver its possessions. And intelligence, articulating our knowledge and understanding that which others indicate to us through speech, establishes the right links and, by immersing itself in them, reorganizes memory. In this way, Augustine points out that language is much more than a system of signs evoking images: it is itself the sign of an interiority. In it, we find ourselves in our memory, which for Augustine is the seat of our consciousness, and thus the foundation of our intelligence and identity, vast and marvellous as a royal castle.

Every word needs memory, our identity needs memory. So here we have language, so wounded by its dependence on something else, beckoning us by its very existence towards that memory which is our interiority. Not the interiority of our fleeting emotions or futile thoughts. No, the one where we discover the depth of our consciousness. The mere existence of language beckons here, as words beckon to the most banal memories. But even the dumbest sentence requires intelligence, at least in potential, to be articulated and understood. An intelligence that springs mysteriously from the depths of consciousness. Augustine would say that this is because in the depths of the «I» lies the true Master, namely the divine Word that structures all creation. In any case, there is the mystery of this interiority. Darkness from which emerge the intellect, the will and the memory that makes us ourselves, as he says in La Trinité, by explaining what the soul is.

The warnings of poetry

But since poetry is made up of words, and more particularly of the very special and chosen links between words and the ideas they convey, it also beckons us to our inner selves. Every bold combination a poet makes is a call to descend into ourselves and discover ourselves. First, we'll see if we've ever experienced anything like it, and if not, we'll learn about it. And the more delirious the poetry seems, the more delicate the places touched in our depths will be. Poetry wants to echo in our hearts. If the purpose of language is to indicate meanings already at the level of everyday communication, let's take a look at what poetry can do! It's a sign, too, but structured in such a way as to shed a special light on very specific places in our intimate memory.

The poet has structured some very fine relationships between sounds, ideas, meanings and connotations - social or personal - and all this is but a supremely fine way of showing something and thus making something resonate within us. And so, even if poetry had no apparent meaning, it can only bring us face to face with ourselves. It plunges into us to warn us: it warns us of what we had forgotten. The thirst for love, the curiosity to know, pain, joy... a whole life of infinite nuances. Poetry diffuses itself into our memory, inviting us not only to remember, but also to reorganize it all.

Poetry, as the poet Davide Rondoni used to say, restores balance and order within the self and between the self and the world. The poet is someone who had a precious word to preserve, and he left us his treasure as a legacy. He was too subtle to give it in the coarse words of common language. We had to find it within ourselves, in our sunken haven, as Ungaretti would say. Poetry takes us back to the place where we discover our relationship with ourselves and with others. It's where we respond to the call of the quest for meaning in our existence. That's why we still read Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Bonnefoy today. They have never ceased to teach us all this.

Poetry restores us to ourselves as integral human beings: men and women living a life that responds to a call. The call of the inner word that makes poetry sing within us, because that is the inner word: the one that responds to and welcomes creation, from the mire to the stars.

Write to the author: giovanni.ryffel@leregardlibre.com