Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium (review)

It is good to see this book again, the same text as in the Garland edition of 1994, graced with a preface by Rosemary Lloyd, in which the crisis of poetry is presented through quotations from the poets as “creative and positive, an invitation or a spur, Valéry’s ‘pensée singulièrement achevée’ that illuminates the senses and the mind” (iv).

I always liked this book, which does meet its goal of presenting “many new directions and possibilities for further research into the intricacies and potentialities of French poetry” (xxii). It does more than that by introducing good readings of a number of poems, often with some concern for how to teach them. William Calin’s article on the fortunes of Ronsard proposes a recasting of “our formulation of tradition” (204) and a new order for rethinking Ronsard as the (or an) “archetypal figure of the poet” for France’s siglo de oro, “extending from La Chanson de Saint-Alexis and La Chanson de Roland to La Fontaine and Boileau” (205). Barbara Johnson’s “Gender and Poetry” (reprinted from 1991) develops Baudelaire’s reading of Desbordes-Valmore to show that, as poets “[m]en are read rhetorically; women, literally” (227) so that in the one case we shift “the domain of a poem’s meaning to a higher, less referential, more abstract and theoretical level” while in the other we look for “an expression of What a Woman Wants” (227). Both of these articles illustrate significant new ways of reading.