Poetry

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees poetry as the first emergence of all literature. It was oral at first and was spoken before it was written, like the Iliad, and the traditional poet is also a bard and the keeper of collective memory1. He defines it as spoken music: it keeps the meaning of prose and adds a musical and temporal dimension, made of rhythm and tone, which affects the utterance rather than what is uttered23. The poet takes up everyday words, but in a different order and with a different function, in order to "give a purer sense to the words of the tribe"4. He often returns to the quip that poetry, unlike mathematics, is an exact science: its rigour does not come from conscious thought but from language, a collective treasure5. For him, thought put into verse is the opposite of poetry, whereas prose can take in as much of it as possible, as the poetic prose of Baudelaire, Nerval and Mallarmé shows.

1. 1Between sea and mountain, the standing stones of Valinco (the Corsican Neolithic)24 Nov 2020 · 8:37
2. 2#10.4 From Lascaux to modern music, the permanence of the political stakes in aesthetics3 Nov 2021 · 49:10
3. 3Left-washing: are the woke the most asleep?17 Nov 2021 · 48:34
4. 4#4 Benefits and harms of amnesia…13 Nov 2020 · 1:10:56
5. 5A springtime of the peoples?18 Mar 2023 · 2:08:46

Summary produced automatically from 21 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.