New poetics of Intimacy in the work of Pierre Reverdy

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, intimacy, for the poet, usually signifies staging the suffering of his own self in his verse, with a variable degree of drama, and offering it to the reader. The exhibition of personal intimacy is a way of creating another form of intimacy, this time of a literary nature, between poet and reader. Pierre Reverdy shattered this system when —while proposing to touch the reader emotionally— he wrote poems without a subject, whose enunciation was carried out by a poetic voice, and when he moved the source of lyricism from the self to the shock created by word associations in the poetic image. A new form of intimacy is thus created, in which the reader has to take responsibility for the lyrical voice, and is then required to look into himself to till out what lies between the lines of the poem. By doing so, the poet opens a door for a poetry featuring the intimacy of the reader, a poetry whose ultimate goal shifts from the expression of the self to the expression of the unsayable, our state of being in the world.