ABSTRACT
I know no better way to place a frame around the things I would like to say in this chapter than to quote the opening words of a beautiful article by Roman Jakobson and Stephen Rudy (1981): “Yeats’ ‘Sorrow of Love’ Through the Years”:
Paul Valéry, both a poet and an inquisitive theoretician of poetry as an “art of language,” recalls the story of the painter Dégas, who loved to write poems, yet once complained to Mallarmé that he felt unable to achieve what he wanted in poetry despite being “full of ideas.” Mallarmé’s apt reply was: “Ce n’est point avec des idées, mon cher Dégas, que I’on fait des vers. C’est avec des mots.”
IT IS NOT AT ALL WITH IDEAS, MY DEAR DÉGAS,
THAT ONE WRITES LINES OF POETRY.
IT IS WITH WORDS.
In Valéry’s view Mallarmé was right, for the essence of poetry lies precisely in the poetic transformation of verbal material and in the coupling of its phonetic and semantic aspects.
