FRENCH 223 Paris of Poets

Contemporary French poet Yves Bonnefoy has suggested the modern city embodies a manmade object, the changing form of which curiously undermines the order it seeks to represent. Le Paris des Poètes applies this observation to poetry to examine the parallels between poetry and urban structure. Throughout the centuries of architectural strata and cultural sedimentation that compose and decompose Paris, and with special reference to the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the poetic inspiration of Paris is linked to what is most uncertain and least structured in the city's layout, and thus to the shock or thrill of the new, which poetry just as often questions.

The poetry of Paris finds its beauty and occasional ugliness in an urban setting that is as infinitely malleable as it is irreducible to a final, fixed form. While many poems from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century offer a general view of Paris, others focus on specific times, places and events in its topography and history. The late nineteenth-century geometrical, political and economic rationalizations of Paris sought by Hausmann's era remain unfinished, and the poets of Paris continue to revel in the added layers of chaos and order that make up the city. Today, twenty arrondissements spiral outward, ever larger, like the schematic of a massive shell, surrounded by the otherwise less orderly banlieues, all of which also makes of Paris a colossal visual poem through which poets continue to find ample mud for their gold from perspectives that are as aesthetic as they are political.

2 papers and a final paper.