MUSICALITY AND GEOMETRIC PERFECTION OF RHYTHM IN THE ROMANIAN POETRY OF ION BARBU
MUSICALITY AND GEOMETRIC PERFECTION OF RHYTHM IN THE ROMANIAN POETRY OF ION BARBU

Summary/Abstract: The current paper aims at illustrating a Romanian literary phenomenon, unique in its manifestation – the semiotic revolution of poetry through rhythm. The poet Ion Barbu succeeds in transferring the weight of semiotic relations from words, perceived as the poem’s nucleus until that moment, on the compositional units of the poem, the verses. By doing this, the poet places his poems at a supralinguistic level, allowing the superseding of the denotative and connotative signifying rapports, which are specific mainly to the literary criticism. Starting from a reality of this kind, from such a meaning, later on associated with the “art of word” (the filling of a pre-verbalized matrix with signified, “secret and revealed” content), we can understand the semiotic reform in Ion Barbu’s poetry, which manifests largely through freeing the rhythms. Semantics loses the word, whereas the poem is situated in the word’s temporal anteriority; the poem puts on the coat of semantics, not of linguistics (a particular case of semantics, so as Saussure was to consider it) and opens the gates to the supralinguistic expression, using extra-linguistics means: rhythm, onomatopoeia, figurative elements, all of which are powerfully charged with symbols.

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