7. Response to an Indictment

So I am the ogre and I’m the scapegoat
At this era’s chaotic, heart-wrenching date:
Who trampled good taste and old French verse? Me.
And—ghastly deed—I told the shadow to: “Be!”
And the shadow was. — That why you’re censuring me.
Language, art, tragedy, dogma, Conservatory—
I am the culprit when all of that old light
Is extinguished; I emptied the urn of night.
I am the clumsy axe, cause of this Brexit;
That is your view. OK; I accept it;
I’m the one your angry prose aims to tank;
Attack me as “Raca” and I reply: “Thanks!”
This (quote) “march of time”—one church’s ‘bye-byes’
Only to join with another, grow ‘civilized’;
These questions (important) of ‘art’, ‘liberty’—
Let’s, by your leave, take them—with humility,
Peer through the wrong end of the spyglass, we can
See I confess it—me (yes!) horrible man;
And though I believe I have really committed
Other crimes worse—which you’ve intermitted—
A meddler in curious questions, mine, yours,
Having probed various illnesses, looked for the cures,
Insulted the bullshits of ancient stupidity,
Shaken from bottom to top past’s avidity,
Ravaged the substance and form, and not least,
I stand by this: I am that hideous beast,
I am the horrible demagogue, freed,
The destroyer of the old A-B-C-D;
Let’s chat.

———Out of school—translation drills
Latin verse—solemn child, shy, pale and chilled,
With brooding brow and feeble limbs; I tried
When, seeking to understand and judge, to open wide
My eyes to nature, art, language—overwhelmed
Commoner and noble—mirroring the realm;
Poetry was, simply, monarchy; a word
Was either mere scribbler, or else duke or lord;
Syllables, nothing more than side-by-siders,
Paris and London; like pedestrians and riders
Cross the Pont Neuf without merging align;
Language was the State before ‘’89;
Words, noble or base, lived in closed castes;
Some, noble, haunting the Phèdres and Jocastes,
The Méropes, bound by the law of decorum,
Riding Versailles in the King’s coach-and-four, them;
The others—a beggar pack, fodder for gallows—
Dwelt down in dialects; some in the galleys
Of slang; consigned to the lowest of genres,
In rags, tattered in market halls; no shoes on there,
Wigless; made for prose and farce, bad shows;
A stylistic rabble disposed in the shadows;
Villeins, boors, peasants—that Vaugelas, their chief
In the Lexicon’s prison, had branded with “F”,
Breathing only the abject and banal air,
Base, bourgeois, branded, low—fit for Molière.
Racine looked askance at these rogues, these perverse;
Where if Corneille found one caught-up in his verse,
He kept it—too great a man to say: “Just go!”
As Voltaire cried out: “Corneille’s stooping low!”
Good old Corneille, humble, doesn’t reply.
Then I came—the brigand; I shouted out: “Why
Must these always be first, and those last?”
And upon the Academy—that dowager matriarch
Hiding shocked tropes beneath her skirts’ grand screens—
And upon the battalions of stiff alexandrines,
I unleashed a revolutionary wind’s flurry:
I crowned with a red cap the old dictionary.
No more “senator” words! No more “commoner” reps!
I whipped up a storm in the inkwell’s depths,
Amidst swirling shadows, I mingled and stirred
White swarms of ideas with the dark throng of words;
And I said: “There’s no word on which an idea, in full flight,
Cannot, still dewy with the azure, alight!”
A dreadful utterance! — hypallage, litotes, syllepsis
Trembled; at the milestone ‘Aristotle’, I climbed up this
And declared all words equal, free, and sovereign.
All the invaders and all the robbers who got in—
Those tigers, Huns, Scythians, Dacians and worse—
Were, beside my audacity, mere yapping curs;
I leapt from the circle and shattered the compasses.
Called the pig by its name; why is it not done as is?
Guicciardini called out the Borgias; Tacitus,
Vitellius. Fierce, implacable, back at this
I ripped the collar of ‘epithets’ from the neck
Of the dumbfounded dog in the yard out back.
On the shadowed grass, I made heifer and cow play nice—
Margoton one, and the other Bérénice.
Then the Ode, embracing Rabelais, grew beerier;
Atop Mount Pindus, they danced the Ça Ira;
The nine Muses, bare-breasted, sang Carmagnole;
Grandiloquence shivered in its Spanish stole;
The muleteer Jean married shepherdess Myrtle.
A king asked: “What time is it?” With actions mortal
I killed alabaster, snow, ivory, ice;
I stripped out the jet from the black of the eyes,
And dared tell the arm: “Be white—simply show it me."
Thus violating the steaming corpse of poetry;
I forced the number in—shock!—Mithridates
Cite Cyzicus’s siege? I’d say what the date is.
Days of dread! Laïses became whores-on-the-go.
And many words—groomed each morning by Restaut,
And retaining the stately bearing of Louis Quatorze—
Still much bewigged; and at these coiffures,
The Revolution, from the top of its steeple,
Shouted: Reform! Now’s the time! Fill up, people,
From the soul of these words you’ve tried to restrain!
And the wig itself roared, and shook out its mane.
Liberty! this is the way, in our rebellions,
We took certain spaniels and fashioned them fell lions,
And that, under the cursed hurricane that we blew,
All kinds of words could come flaming bright through.
On Lhomond’s Grammar I stuck a proclamation.
It read: “We have to complete this, great nation!
To the basket with Bouhours, Brossettes, Batteux!
They took man’s thought and applied the thumbscrew.
To arms, prose and verse! Brigades, rally the flag!
See where we are now when verse has been gagged,
The ode has irons on its feet, the drama’s under lock-key.
Campistron swarms over Racine’s dead body! —”
Boileau just gritted his teeth; I had to shout:
“Quiet!” I yelled through the storm’s thunderbolt:
“War on all rhetorics, peace to all syntaxes!
And the whole ’93 burst out. This axis,
Saw them all turn-round: athos, ithos and pathos.
The soldiers, releasing Pourceaugnac and Cathos,
Pursuing Dumarsais to their low-dive, loud-dingy,
Where Permesse’s enema waters syringed him.
The syllable, crushed the law tying it down,
Verbs as pariahs, the low peasant noun,
All came running. We drank the horror to the dregs.
Unearthing what Athalie dreams of in bed;
They scattered the ashes of story, the wind whips,
From Theramenes to star ‘Institute’s eclipse.
Yes, they made a clean sweep of the ancien regime,
And I clapped hands, drank from sentences’ bloodstream,
When I saw, by the foaming strophe, and saying
Things in a style both enormous and braying,
The Art of Poetry caught in the common road,
And when I saw, in among the rushing crowd,
By all the words denied by good taste’s rule-setter,
From the spirit lamppost hang the aristocrat letter.
Yes, I am that Danton! I am this Robespierre!
I have, fighting Noble Word with its long rapier,
Incited the ignoble slave-word to turncoat,
And, once Dangeau was dead, I slit Richelet’s throat.
Yes, it’s the truth, these are some of my crimes.
I captured and broke-up the Bastille of rhymes.
I did more: I snapped-off each-every iron shackle
That chained the Word people, and brought up from black hell
Sepulchral legions—the elder damned phrases;
I have crushed the word-coils with my own periphrasis,
And mixed, confused, levelled beneath skies of sable
The alphabet, dark tower, born out of Babel;
I was not unaware what the wrathful hand brought:
He who sets-free the word, sets-free the thought.

In man’s efforts unity’s the attributive term.
Everything the same arrow that hits the same aim.

So, yes, it’s here, in honest style attributed,
Various of my sins, and also I bring my head.
You must be of the older generation, Grandpa,
For the tenth time I perform mea culpa.
Yes, if Beauzée is god, then I’m an atheist.
The language was in order, dust-free, august,
A gold fleur-de-lys, Tristan-Boileau, blue ceiling,
The forty armchairs and the throne in-betweening;
Illustrious salon! And here I besmeared
Broke pretty much the whole lot; the peasant Proper Word
Was only a corporal: I promoted him colonel;
I made a Jacobin of the Pronoun Personal,
And the Participle, a slave with white-hairs,
A hyena: I made Verb one of anarchy’s hydras.
There’s my confitentem reum! Storm blows!
I said to the nostril: “Why you’re just a nose!”
I said to the golden fruit: “you’re just a pear!”
I said to Vaugelas: You are just a jaw!
I said in words: Be a republic! Just be
The immensest anthill, and work! And believe!
Love! live! — I set all in motion, and, morose,
I threw noble verse to the black dogs of prose.

And what I did, others have also done;
And better. Calliope, Euterpe’s chill tone,
Polymnia, they’ve lost their false gravity.
We are tipping the scales of heroic poetry.
That’s right, curse us. Lines which, on their brow
Formerly, wore twelve feathers in a row,
And shuttlecock-leapt from the doubled racket
One we call prosody and one etiquette,
Now breaka all the rules, evade the scissors’ snip,
And escape, changing in flight to a bird, slip
From the caesura cage, flee to the ravine,
And fly in the skies, you lark of the divine.

All words are now soaring into clarity.
Writers have gifted the language liberty.
And, thanks to these bandits, to these dog-eat-dogs,
Truth, hunting swarms of those sad pedagogues,
Imagination, with a hundred voices, noisy,
Breaking the mind-windows of the bourgeoisie,
Triple-faced Poetry, who laughs, sighs, sings chorus,
Who mocks and believes; whom Shakespeare and Plautus
Planted, to the mob, and to those of low station;
Who pours out the wisdom of Job to the nations
And Horace’s good sense, will through her furor;
Her immense frenzy intoxicate the azure,
And who, sacred madwoman with dazzling eyes,
Ascends to eternity through the time as it flies,
The muse reappears, and restores us again,
Starts weeping once more over all human pain,
Strikes and consoles, from zenith to nadir,
Making all foreheads to shine bright and clear
Her flight, lyre of whirlwind, tempest sparkings,
And her millions of eyes on her millions of wings.

The movement thus brings-in its own conclusion.
Thanks to you, holy progress, this Revolution
Vibrates in the air now, in voice, in book.
In the throbbing word, the reader feels it life-stuck.
It cries out, it sings, teaches, its laughter rolls.
Its tongue is unshackled, as so is its soul.
It is in the novel, speaks softly to women.
It opens two eyes in which light is now flaming,
One on the thinker, the other on the citizen.
It takes Liberty, its sister, in its grip again,
And enters in every man through every pore.
Prejudice, formed like coral reef shore
From the sombre accreditation of ills over time,
Breaks at the impact of her floating rhyme
Full of her will, and her purpose, her soul.
She is prose, she is verse, she is drama, she’s all;
She is expression, she’s true sentiment,
Light in the streets, star in the firmament.
She penetrates depths of the language deep down;
Breathes life into art, is a strong megaphone;
And, as is God’s will, having filled to increase
The people with her pride, erased the old crease
From their brows, and raised the crowd out of their fear,
And, having become Law, she becomes Idea!

Paris, January 1834.