Conclusion: Knowing Poetry, Knowing Communities

Summary

As the Preface has shown, over and above the contributions that the individual chapters in this volume make to our understanding of their respective subjects, they feed into a more synthetic view of the culture of knowledge surrounding late medieval French poetry. The role of this conclusion is to draw out the main features of this culture. It might usefully be characterised as a set of answers to the question: between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries in France, what makes poetry propitious to conveying knowledge and to establishing communities? These answers cluster around five issues which, while being not always specific to poetry, are more highly concentrated, more urgent, in verse than in prose. Some of these issues are to do with poetry's ability to convey knowledge as a consequence of its shape and form: knowledge is yoked to the text's physical form in quoted or recontextualized material, and in the interpretation of that material. Others concern the public character and therapeutic value of verse, which signal its propensity to carry an experiential knowledge that links the individual to the communal or the universal.

The first of these issues is the quotability of the verse text, which inheres in the formal and structural aspects of a poem that allow its ready citation. This propensity to quotation mirrors a cognitive or experiential process which Antoine Compagnon has called ‘solicitation’. Why might some parts of a text be more apt to be quoted than others? Why do some passages more than others ‘solicit’ their severance from their context? Though Compagnon is not discussing verse texts specifically, his account of solicitation hints at a crucial way in which a poem infiltrates the consciousness of the reader and lodges itself there for later citation:

La sonorité d'une gutturale, l'écho d'une voyelle, un rhythme adapté à ma respiration ou à mes réflexes – je ne manque jamais de souligner les alexandrins perdus dans un ouvrage de philosophie […]: tous accidents oú le texte lui-même n'est pas pour grand-chose, mais qui me sollicitent autant.

The ‘alexandrins’ Compagnon alludes to here are the classic twelve-syllable lines of French poetry whose patterning is so ingrained in the national consciousness that they can appear unbidden – or as Compagnon puts it, become ‘lost’ – in non-poetic writing.