"Second, her lack of formal education left her free to bypass a
stultifying rhetorical tradition. In an 1839 letter to her husband
(Lettres, 1:151), she explicitly rejects the traditional sonnet (which
Baudelaire was going to revitalize in Les fleurs du mal) - her more
than 600 poems include only 3 - calling it nothing but a brilliant
straitjacket created by men. Instead, by experimenting constantly with
verse forms, original metrical and rhythmic patterns, and diction, she
achieves a musicality based on actual spoken language: a series of
short interjections or imperatives, common verbs, rapid-fire questions
followed by staccato answers, frequent repetitions, strings of
subjects and verbs without subordinate clauses, and formulaic,
colloquial and prosaic expressions from contemporary speech. Her
lexicon includes nonpoetic words such as raser (shave or skim), ciment
(cement), and forceps, all of which become powerful images, because
they were then uncommon in literary writing. The conversational
rhythms harmonize with her frequent use of irregular or free verse
instead of the classical alexandrine, which favors intricate
rhetorical effects and a periodic sentence structure."
Michael Dahany (A New History of French Literature, 733:734)
which, by pure chance, I happened to read this morning.
--
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"Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious." Oscar Wilde
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