Ekaterina M. Belavina, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory, 1, 119991, Moscow, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4038-7815
In the history of the formation of vers libre, the innovation of Arthur Rimbaud has become a recognised fact, but the role of Paul Verlaine is not limited to the fact that he contributed to the publication of Rimbaud’s poems, which are considered to be the first examples of free verse in French. Both Verlaine and Rimbaud felt with their inner ear metrical boundaries, in particular caesura, demonstrated in their poems great freedom in handling this prosodic element. Rimbaud, when reading Verlaine’s collection “Fêtes galantes”, draws attention not to the images, but precisely to the non-classical caesura. The article presents a typology of anomalies in caesura, showing the relevance of non-classical caesura for modern French verse after the destruction of syllabic. In French verse studies, Rimbaud’s poem “Qu’est-ce pour nous, mon cœur”, written as a response to the suppression of the Paris Commune, is considered to be the first text in which the concentration of violations of caesura rules calls into question the possibility of continuing to write in Alexandrian verse (Roubaud, Cornullier). The caesura as a prosodic modifier (Meschonnic) was the carrier of a collective memory of pronunciation norms and practices of reading verse. The displacement of the caesura and its punning was one of the stages of the disintegration of syllabic, the transition to vers libre, a verse of a new social order, new reading practices in the situation of paper-book accessibility.
French verse; caesura; vers libre; French literature; Verlaine; Rimbaud.
01.10.2024
10.11.2024
Belavina, E.M. “Moving Invisible Borders: Caesura in Verlaine and Rimbaud”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 1(67), 2025, pp. 178–196. (In Russ.)
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