« Une réaffirmation de l’élément ‹ musical › de l’écriture » – Yves Bonnefoy, une musique entre guillemets

Abstract

“Toute la langue, ajustée à la métrique, y recouvrant ses coupes vitales, s’évade,” says Stéphane Mallarmé, “avec les cris d’une orchestration.” T.S. Eliot devotes a famous essay to The Music of Poetry (Eliot 1942). Among poets, the fact that music is in poetry seems to be a commonplace analogy. The reader is therefore not surprised when Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), an original practitioner of the French verse, seems to be suggesting a “reaffirmation of the ‘musical’ element in writing” (tr. N.V.) in L’alliance de la poésie et de la musique (Bonnefoy 2007). Quotation marks, however, keep at bay what they quote, and express a doubt as to its nature.