The Poet in the Literary Marketplace

The Poet in the Literary Marketplace

Geraldine
Vogel
Department of French, Spanish, and Italian University of Manitoba
nicolas.vogel@mb.sympatico.ca

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The ARTFL database provides material for studying the literary fortunes of
the image of the poet in 19th century French literature. The patterns in
distributions of allusions to poets and poetry are compared to those of
sales of books of poems to gauge the importance of literary allusions to
poetry as a reflection of societal trends.

Data
The ARTFL database for the period 1789-1914 is examined, since the French
Revolution and the outbreak of World War I are useful boundaries to the
historical period which can be called the 19th century for sake of
simplicity. Three search strings, poEme.*, poEsie.*, and poEt.* retrieve all
forms of the words "poème" (poem), "poésie" (poetry), "poète" (poet), and
"poétique" (poetic). Other words like "vers" (line of poetry, but also worm,
and towards) are not retrieved because of the problem of polysemy. This
approach can be justified in terms of the theory of semantic categories
developed by Lakoff (1987) and is similar to the one used by Olsen (1991) to
examine gender representation in French literature.
Results produced by the ARTFL search engine are divided into chronological
periods using the break-down suggested by Imbs (1971), and are further
divided into the following genres on the basis of what is provided by the
ARTFL search engine: Novel, Theater, Poetry, Non-Literary Prose. In all
cases of period and genre identification, decisions embodied in the
structure of the ARTFL database are respected. The raw numbers provided by
ARTFL have been divided by the number of words in all the texts in a given
period and genre, then multiplied by 10,000 so that relative frequencies can
be compared.

Results
Table 1 contains the relative frequencies of the words most likely to evoke
poetry in the periods and genres explained above.

Table 1: Relative Frequency of Evocations of Poetry in 19th Century
French Literature

Period
Novel
Theater
Poetry
Non-Fiction Prose

1789-1816
2.32
1.60
10.73
3.26

1816-32
2.50
1.30
6.28
3.50

1833-41
2.62
50.23
70.46
7.10

1842-49
6.90
0.41
27.35
4.51

1850-59
2.28
0.38
5.82
4.33

1860-69
0.94
2.44
5.73
6.14

1870-79
0.53
0.86
4.24
4.87

1880-92
1.25
4.10
1.01
7.10

1893-1907
1.56
1.48
15.43
3.83

1908-14
1.95
0.31
3.18
6.66

The high number of allusions to poetry in the theater of the period 1833-41,
in poetic texts for the period 1833-1849, and in the novel of 1842-49
corresponds to the Romantic period in France. Indeed, Lamartine, a leading
Romantic poet was named provisional President of the Republic in 1848. The
decline in the allusions to poets and poetry seems to correspond with the
rise of realism in literature, and with the collapse of Romantic ideals of
political power after the coup d'état engineered by Napoleon III in
1851.
A second period of increased importance of poetry begins in 1880-92 in the
novel and continues to 1914, with similar but less systematic increases in
the theater and in poetry itself. This has led certain historians of
literature, like Echelard (1994), and Lagarde and Michard (1969) to talk
about an increase of prestige and influence of poets and poetry in the final
years of the 19th century.

Discussion
The ARTFL search engine provides a list in descending order of frequency of
the texts which produced the allusions to a given term. What is particularly
noticeable in these data is the familiarity of the names of the authors of
the early 19th century who frequently alluded to poetry: Balzac,
Chateaubriand, Hugo, Musset, Vigny. The late 19th century authors who
contribute to the second, and smaller, rise in allusions to poetry are much
closer in time, but less familiar, even to a specialist in French
literature: Bloy, France, Gobineau, Huysmans, Péladan, Rolland. Poetry as a
cultural phenomenon seems to have been progressively marginalised from the
mid to the late 19th century.
Table 2 shows the number of literary texts published per annum during a part
of the period under consideration (Charle 1985).

Table 2: Annual Production of Literary Texts: 1830-1905.

Period
Novel
Theater
Poetry
Total

1830-40
210
258
365
833

1840-75 (estimates)
246
220
78
544

1876-85
621
196
139
956

1886-90
774
264
236
1274

1891-99
630
257
249
1136

1900-05
775
278
241
1394

Not only did the late 19th century production of books of poetry never come
close to equaling the numbers achieved in the high Romantic period
(1830-40), but the proportion of volumes of literary texts devoted to poetry
is considerably smaller at the end of the 19th century than at the
beginning. This empirical information can be combined with the impression
that less important literary personalities stressed the importance of poetry
at the end of the period than at the beginning, to produce a general
interpretation. It would seem, then, that while poetic vision was an
important social force during the Romantic period, those who knew what the
society valued, because they produced books for the market, did not consider
it important in the years immediately preceding the First World War, in
spite of what certain critics were to suggest at a later date.

Conclusion
The ARTFL database provides information which allows one to evaluate the
importance of the theme of the poet in French literature. The society in
general, not just those who write for publication, is then, as now, the
final arbiter of what is important and what is not in a given culture at a
particular time. The information provided by the ARTFL search engine about
the names of those writers who stressed the importance of poetry can be
related to general knowledge to suggest that the late 19th century
renaissance of interest in poetry was not an important social force, when
compared to the Romantic period. Independent information, in the form of
publication data, confirms this judgment.

References

Christophe
Charle

Le Champ de production littéraire

Histoire de l'édition Française

Paris
Promodis. III
1985
119-35

Michel
Echelard

Histoire de la littérature en France au XIXe
siècle

Paris
Hatier
1994

Paul
Imbs

Dictionnaire des Fréquences
4 vols.

Nancy
C.N.R.S.-T.L.F.
1971

George
Lakoff

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories
Reveal about the Mind

Chicago
The University of Chicago Press
1987

André
Lagarde

Laurent
Michard

XXe siècle

Paris
Bordas
1969

Mark
Olsen

Gender Representation and Histoire des Mentalités:
Language and Power in the Trésor de la langue française

Histoire et Mesure

6

349-73
1991