Giving up a question

Abstract

The text re-inscribes the poem gift in the economic model that underlies it unconsciously in the XIX century, and undertakes to rethink the crisis of the poetic value in the post-romantic modernity in the light of the new relation the poetic gift maintains then with the model of the commercial trade in the capitalist economy. From this point of view, Victor Hugo belongs to another age of the poetry: the gift of the poem (to the poor) is thought as charity; and charity gratifies back the poet with a symbolic gain, without any admitted commercial value, but capable of adorning poetry with a religious aura or conferring to lyricism the revolutionary accents of humanitarian poetry. These values crumble with the failure of the revolution of 1848. Poetry, through Baudelaire, Verlaine or Mallarmé, denounces then the idealism by which it participated in the occultation of the political and social dimension of “pauperism”. And, while learning another way of monetizing itself, it undertakes to “donner sa langue aux chiens”, allowing the real misery not idealized to return, in all its violence, on the poem scene.

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Original in French.