ABSTRACT
A close reading of Les Aventures de Telemaque suggests that contesting the majesty of verse poetry, while an aesthetic battle, was also an expression of dissatisfaction with absolutism and an aspiration to reform; to defend it translated as much a poetic ideal as concern with the loss of order, the leveling of hierarchies, and the prospect of popular insurrection. It is tempting to interpret eighteenth-century prose poems as evidence of a revolt against meter that would foreshadow the modernists' own revolt in the twentieth century. As people will see with La Motte, there was intense, sustained, even increasing dissatisfaction with metrics and versification. The tide turned between 1645 and 1652 when critics began again to compare prose with poetry. In 1713, on the occasion of his Iliade en douze chants, an ab ridged versification of the original, La Motte corresponded with Fénelon, and subsequently published the letters as a contribution to the critical debate generated by the "querelle d'Homère.".
