An anthology highlights the scientific poetry of XIXe century, and shows the diversity of links between poetic form and knowledge. Until 1830, scientists were writers and philosophers ; then, poetry and science distance themselves.
Bringing to light a little-known literary continent is the project of the copious anthology published in Le Seuil under the direction of Hugues Marchal. Organized around a specific genre, the “ scientific poetry “, and of a defined historical period, along XIXe century, the work highlights the longevity of a genre whose fortune we have forgotten. By giving us the opportunity to read unknown texts from canonical authors such as Lucretia, Ronsard, La Fontaine, Hugo or Nodier, as well as important texts from authors that we no longer read, and who were abundantly celebrated in their time, the book fills perfectly his ambition. Thus Jacques Delille, author of a long poem on Three Kingdoms of Nature of which the naturalist Cuvier signed the notes – Delille appears as the leader of a genre which unfolded under the Revolution and the Empire, and which most often presents itself as an invitation to knowledge:
Look around for rich knowledge
Who, charming your leisure, doubles your enjoyments.
Three kingdoms display their secrets in your eyes.
A master must always know his subjects:
Observe the treasures that nature assembles.
Come: let us walk, see, and enjoy together.
(Jacques Delille, The Man of the Fields, or the French GeorgicsStrasbourg, Levrault, p. 98).
The work retraces the major stages of the fascinating history of the links between poetry and science, which is as much the story of an encounter as of a divorce. It was in fact at this time that some of the characterizations were put in place which confirmed the sharing of disciplines and distanced literary work from scientific work: “ thorns of science ” against “ flowers of literature », coldness of the surveyor against enthusiasm of the poet. Even if it is to affirm that we must go beyond them, the XIXe century helps to fix these dichotomies. As the introduction states: “ debates on the poetry of science have constructed our current vision of the relationships between science and literature, their values and their respective functions “. The book perfectly illuminates the paradox of scientific poetry: “ Does the aesthetic, lexicological, rhetorical and syntactic research that drives poets impose a form of degradation on truth? ? Aren’t their flowers another veil, which condemns poetry to say without saying ? » (pp. 28-29).
Thorns and flowers
By its structure as by the choice of texts, the work emphasizes the diversity of the links between poetic form and knowledge over the centuries: mythical and original link between the poet and the scholar, but also “ ancient feud » between the two since Plato, who banished Homer from the ideal city, while Aristotle refused scholarly writing a place in the poetic field. This is because we suspect poetry of using its power of seduction in a domain which should less charm than instruct. Voltaire states: “ Nothing is more inappropriate than to speak of physics poetically, and to lavish figures, ornaments, when all that is required is method, clarity and truth. “. The processes of legitimization of this rapprochement are therefore part of the genre: it is a question of putting knowledge into a poem to ennoble it, to memorize it, to disseminate it, or to respond to the Horacian injunction ofuseful dulci. Depending on the era, the authors highlight an indivision of poetry and science, or their fruitful collaboration. The epistemological value of Homer, Virgil and Ovid can thus be affirmed by means of an allegorical interpretation of their texts. To declare that knowledge is present under the veil of myth is to defend the intrinsic value of didactic poetry as a specific genre, and to revive the ideal of the poet-philosopher, inspired by the gods.
Result of a ANR and the fruit of the collaboration of numerous researchers, the work stands out as a reference, and a particularly useful working tool in the increasingly developed field of studies on science and literature in France: in addition to the presentation texts attached to each extract, it offers several indexes, succinct biographies of all the scholars cited, a thematic table of contents, numerous illustrations, and “ close-ups » welcome, in the form of short articles on specific subjects. The general organization is less chronological than thematic: in addition to an introductory chapter and a final chapter on the previous tradition of the genre and its evolution over the XXe century, the other chapters explore in turn the ambitions, the fault lines and the tensions between the two modes of discourse, to the point of making significant room for critiques of the genre, taunts and polemics on the role of literature scholarly. He is accused of singing about the most trivial objects, or even of being adverts:
The Washer
He’s more of a housewife
Who sees it coming while trembling
The time when the whole family
Will need white linen…
Well ! thanks to the Washer
That Monsieur Michel invented,
It’s singing, laughing lips,
That now we will wash.
In the blink of an eye, almost without difficulty,
The laundry comes out of the appliance,
Like a boiling sheath,
Clean, fresh, unparalleled white.
(J. Dehem, The Resurrection of Credit. Epic, fantastic, lyrical, biographical, serious and fanciful poem. In two songs. A Dedication, a Prologue, an Invocation and an ApotheosisAmong all booksellers, 1874, p. 23-24. Quoted in Muses and Pterodactyls, p. 415.)
J. Dehem’s advertising poems are less hymns to progress than to credit and consumption. They represent one of the avatars of what romanticism denounces and despises in the vogue for scientific poetry: its lack of structure, of emotion, its dull descriptions, and, above all, its total absence of formal innovation, to the point that according to Sainte-Beuve, poetry would be “ dead in spirit » unless we reject this false poetry in favor of “ true art “.
The end of polymaths
While highlighting the texts, the work therefore offers the result of in-depth research on the question of poetry and knowledge. The diachronic perspective is enlightening, and provides new elements for understanding the major stages of the separation between science and literature. Founded on the ideal of the polymath poet during the Renaissance, poetry “ scientist » finds its letters of nobility and its great defenders in Ronsard, Scève, Belleau, du Bartas or Peletier du Mans, who declares: “ Our poet needs knowledge of astrology, cosmography, geometry, physics, in short, all of philosophy. “. At XVIIe century, scientific poetry corresponds to the ideal of the honest man, allowing access to science without pedantry, then participates in an even more essential way in the enterprise of the Enlightenment, by bringing it its prestige. At XIXe century, industrial poetry claims to sing progress against obsolete poetry and outdated literary institutions:
I am young and yet so beautiful
Let everyone worship me on their knees ;
I found no rebel,
Each of my strength is jealous:
Because I am the immense Vapor !
I hold the future now ;
With the century I begin
And I will never end !
(Maxime Du Camp, “ The steam “, Modern SongsMichel Lévy, 1855, p. 249-263. Quoted on p. 271.)
The study identifies 1830 as the tipping point: before this date, scientists were still above all writers and philosophers. After this date, the extension of the field of science and its fragmentation due to greater specialization led to an increasingly clear distinction between literature and science, and sometimes a hierarchy for the benefit of the second. The opposition of certain writers to ambient scientism (Bonald, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Verlaine, to name only the most famous) confirms a rupture between the two camps, already initiated by the division of academic and school disciplines after the Revolution. We thus discover throughout the texts a poetry placed at the heart of public debate, which makes rhyme and verse a weapon or a slogan.
As Hugues Marchal indicates in his introduction, such an editorial enterprise highlights the “ vanquished by culture », those whose history or texts have been retained. It is therefore an offbeat way of rereading both literary history and the history of science that such work offers, by allowing us to question the relationships between science and literature in relation to a specific context, that of the emergence of positivism and scientism during the XIXe century. By calling into question the sharing of disciplines that we have inherited, the work invites us to reflect on the historicity of tastes and literary hierarchies. Because scientific (or didactic, or demonstrative) poetry defines an aesthetic against which many writers of the time are opposed. Thus Balzac, for whom the disproportion between trivial subjects and their grandiloquent treatment is material for comic pastiches of the didactic-scientific poem. Or Flaubert, who writes schoolboy verses about the vaccine, in a youth project of scientific tragedy. The book traces the original suspicion of the genre, from Antiquity to the classical age, then sets out the arguments which allowed it to continually be reborn. This questioning of the place of knowledge in literature, and of the capacity of poetry to be a bearer of knowledge, runs through the entire work and makes it a major contribution to studies devoted to the cognitive powers of literature.