Les poètes orphiques et les poètes prométhéens : une étude croisée des œuvres de John Keats et Arthur Rimbaud

Details

Supervisors

Zanone, Damien

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

enLiterary criticism has always felt the need to classify literary productions, literature thus being a matter of movements or labels that categorize authors according to themes, writing styles, or even according to a relation to concepts that are themselves closely related to these practices. These distinctions, however valid, nevertheless seem to exert unconscious pressure on the reader and often force her/him to look at the text too closely and/or with blinkers. The analyst’s critical eye is thus biased, her/his attention being directed to specific elements to the expense of others that are equally (or sometimes even more) interesting or revealing. In order to not depart from this tradition, the present Master dissertation establishes a new classification. Based on the complete works of the English romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), this dissertation proposes a classification based not on aesthetic or thematic criteria, but rather on an analysis of the poet’s function, on the conception of the poetry that her/his work conveys and especially on the evolutions that the latter two undergo during her/his career. In other words, this classification is based on an analysis of the poetic trajectory taken, or perhaps more accurately undergone, by poets. Seen from this angle, the works of John Keats and Arthur Rimbaud allow us to distinguish what we have chosen to call “Orphic poets” and “Promethean poets”. Finally, in addition to offering a new reading of the works and poetry of these two poets, the present dissertation also defends and illustrates the usefulness and interest of a resolutely evolutionary method of analysis of literary works, as opposed to the synthetic one generally adopted by critical works. This dissertation demonstrates that an evolutionary method makes it possible to grasp the true movements of a poetic work, since it allows to uncover some secrets of a thought that ignores itself but that animated this work anyway.