« I wandered beneath the sky, Muse! And I was your faithful » The vagrant in French poetry from the second half of the Nineteenth Century Cover Image

« J’allais sous le ciel, Muse ! et j’étais ton féal ». Le vagabond dans la poésie française de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle
« I wandered beneath the sky, Muse! And I was your faithful » The vagrant in French poetry from the second half of the Nineteenth Century

Author(s): Maia Varsimashvili-Raphael
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Studies of Literature, Comparative Study of Literature, French Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Instytut Filologii Romańskiej & Wydawnictwo Werset
Keywords: French poetry; Nineteenth Century; vagrant; marginality; space

Summary/Abstract: Throughout history, vagrancy appears as one of the notions of the Human Condition. Its artistic and poetical representations are drawn from multiple sources and offer various models. The fantasy of vagrancy in French poetry in the second half of the Nineteenth Century is fashioned as much through the vagrant’s relationship with space as with Society. Its models spring from marginality and contestation. Spatial structure presents an opposition between « closed » and « open », « interior » and « exterior », and so forth... These separations fluctuate and interact mutually. The poet conjures, from any questing, marginal figure, his own image. The general tendency, from Hugo to Rimbaud, shows both a crushing of the poetical figure, transforming it into a magus or a prophet, and the proliferation of the accursed poet’s « negating anger ».

  • Issue Year: 2014
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 56-66
  • Page Count: 11
  • Language: French