The Ladder of High Designs: Structure and Interpretation of French Lyric Sequence - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813912717 ISBN 13: 9780813912714

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 1991

Synopsis

This work examines the relation of individual poems to the book of poetry as a whole in collections of French lyric poetry from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The contributors address the means by which a body of discrete and self contained poems coalesce into a cohesive unit organized by the poet and not by outside editors or compilers. Although widely divergent in their approaches, the contributors explore how poets resolve the problem of creating a work from a varied poetic production without subordinating the essence of their production, the lyric utterance, to the arrangement that they adopt. Because the essays included here deal with a variety of works from the Middle Ages to the present, historical concepts of order and coherence emerge as essential elements of changing form; poetic collections appear to respond both to earlier forms and to a current sense of order or disorder, continuity or discontinuity.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813912717
• ISBN 13: 9780813912714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Fenoaltea Doranne, Rubin David Lee