poeticity

Faguet answers Voltaire’s remarks upon the famous couplet of Rodogune: “Il est des noeuds secrets, il est des sympathies . . .” to the effect that “the poet is always himself talking and that passion does not thus express itself,” by saying that people are accustomed to express themselves in this way, that is to say, in the form of general ideas, when they are calm, as though the question could be settled with an appeal to the reality of ordinary life, whereas on the contrary it is a question of poeticity, that is to say, of the tragic situation, which by its own nature, excludes couplets in certain cases, however well turned they be.

1920, Benedetto Croce, translated by Douglas Ainslie, “The Mechanism of the Cornelian Tragedy”, in Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, page 399

There are few pages which present no obscurity by traditional standards, and the novel reads as a long poem. The poeticity of My Lovely Enemy is underlined by the frequent use of quotations from poems, making the novel an actual ‘collage.’

1985, Pierre Spriet, “Structure and Meaning in Rudy Wiebe’s My Lovely Enemy”, in Robert Kroetsch, Reingard M[onika] Nischik, editors, Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature (Western Canadian Literary Documents; VI), Edmonton, Alta.: NeWest Press, →ISBN, page 59