Roland Barthes : musique et poésie

Abstract

It has often been asked why poetry occupied a secondary place only in Roland Barthes’ work. What if the explanation were related to the separation of poetry and music? His diploma thesis of higher studies in 1941, which he devoted to “Evocations and Incantations in the Greek Tragedy”, shows how sensitive the young Barthes was to the profound union of words and sounds. This harmony between the arts allowed Aeschylus to call out to the dead and bring them back from the underworld. But now that it is no longer possible to believe in the omnipotence of poetry set to music, all that remains for Barthes is to explore its distant avatars: prayer, prosody, magic, and fiction.