For a historical and gradual conception of poetry. The interaction of semantic, enunciative and iconic dimensions in three poems (Sponde, Follain, Bonnefoy)

Abstract

We argue in this paper that poetic texts, as well as any other texts should be analysed through 3 perspectives: semantic, iconic and enunciative, each one with a positive pole and a negative one. According to the semantic perspective, poetic and scientific texts are both on the positive pole, because they create a new representation of the world. According to the iconic one, that Jakobson called the poetic function, poems are generally near the positive pole but their accurate position depends on formal characteristics which have changed along history. They share this position with texts such as advertisements, songs or nursery rhymes. According to enunciation, a lot of poetical texts belonging to lyrics stand on an average position between the 2 poles, since they do not show their literary origin and give themselves as ordinary utterances, but it is not the case for epics, which stands very near from the positive pole, such as novel and fictional texts. Defining 3 different perspectives and ranking texts from a positive to a negative pole for each of them allow to better appreciate the specificity of poetical texts among other texts but also to take into account the very important evolution of poetry along the centuries. After presenting our model, we make it work on 3 different poems: a baroque sonnet from Jean de Sponde, a free-verse poem from Jean Follain and a prose poem from Yves Bonnefoy.