Marie Dauguet's poetic credo (1906)

 

REVUE LITTÉRAIRE

de Paris et de Campagne

July 1906, pp. 228-231

 

Marie Dauguet

 

Parthenon, Cathedral? The first voluptuously satisfies my reason, the second logically enchants my imagination. I use the word logically ‘the heart having reasons that reason does not know’.

Parthenon: a magnificent discourse were all the sections hold onto and stem from each other, a theorem lucently demonstrated. Cathedral: a symphonic ode for multiple voices, alternating choirs, explosions of ecstatic accents, harmonic splendour that has never been surpassed.

Parthenon and Cathedral, but I savour, but I endure both of them.

The sonnets of J.-M. de Hérédia penetrate me with a fine sun-lit joy.

The songs without words of pauvre Lelian coddle so suavely the melancholy hours in their musical half-light.

And there are vers libres that are distributors of intoxication: a cry of the faun that bites at the cluster of grapes, a quivering of green flutes or beautiful bewitched fables which evoke the silhouette of princesses concealed in the niches of towers, of phantom-like spinsters close to starts where an anxious flame is dancing.

And perhaps, because of its gift of giddiness, of enlightenment which restricts one to the sensations procured by music, is it perhaps this form – vers libre – that I prefer? I envisage to myself that Beethoven’s symphonies were written in vers libres…

It is in vers libres that one loves, that one murmurs one’s love, that one weeps and cries out one’s pain.

It is the immediate expression of nature and of instinct.

But beautiful verse, measured, cadenced, perfectly eurhythmic which geniuses have created in succession, which we are indebted to the sweet and pompous Ronsard, to Racine, to Hugo, to the Parnassians as well  - to those who count – this beautiful verse which is the apogee of art and its supreme expression, for that which is of words and thus of emotion and of thought exteriorised by sound – this beautiful verse touches me infinitely, precisely because of its supernaturalism, its excessive refinement and that which it contains of the artificial – I am using the word in its old sense – of creation in a word purely human. I thus appreciate it and I honour it for all its worth.

To sum up, in poetry as in everything else, everything pleases me which is to me a source of pleasures, of tears, or of curiosity, and my considerable eclecticism makes choices difficult and distinctions too absolute, almost impossible.