« J’aurais voulu parler sans images, simplement… » : Le rejet des images poétiques dans la poésie française contemporaine
The Refusal of Poetic Images in Contemporary French Poetry

Summary/Abstract: Celebrated by Louis Aragon as a pure “narcotic” to be used constantly, wildly and passionately, the poetic image is meant to function as an almost illegally adjuvant in order to bring to life the most extravagant artificial paradises. This is, at least, what Surrealists poets claim. Or that claim will be later denounced as a mere delusion, many French poets writing after 1945 insisting on the deceptiveness of the (visual and rhetorical) images. May poetic representation do without the mediation of imagery and poetic devices? In this paper we endeavour to answer this question, basing our analysis on a collection of short prose written by a contemporary French poet, Philippe Jaccottet.

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