Paul Verlaine Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Carol de Dobay Rifelj

Critical Essay by Carol de Dobay Rifelj

SOURCE: “Familiar and Unfamiliar: Verlaine's Poetic Diction,” in Romance Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1982, pp. 365–77.

In the following essay, de Dobay Rifelj explores neoclassical diction in Verlaine's poetry.

In order for a figure to exist, a comparison must be possible between one form of expression and another which could have been used instead. As Gérard Genette notes, “l'existence et le caractère de la figure sont absolument déterminés par l'existence et le caractère des signes réels en posant leur équivalence sémantique.”¹ This is the case not only with conventional tropes, but also with diction: only if another signifier is possible: je m'ennuie for je m'emmerde, catin for putain, does there come into existence a different kind of figure, a figure of register. On the next level of signification, coursier for horse carries the message “I am poetry” just as much as does voile for ship. But it stands only...
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