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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2011

Indirection and meaning in the poems of George Mackay Brown

Dominique Delmaire

Résumé

Here is what, in Eliotian fashion, the contemporary Scottish poet George Mackay Brown declares about poetic composition: "very occasionally [...] one's own directing will is hushed and laid asleep, and then words, images, rhythms, appear on the page that writer knows with joy beyond his own capacities"; and elsewhere: He knew that a poem was stirring inside him, feeling ― though blind and inarticulate still ― its dazzling way through the darkness: a rhythm, an uncertain pulsing, like a late migrant bird lost now and bewildered for a moment, yet on the true course, unerring. It would find its way. The light grew a little, there was an image: the farm, horses, a harvest-field... This description of the poem in the making could equally apply to the texture of the finished poem, where signification appears hesitant, tentative, retarded ― limping, and occasionally suspended, between accretions and setbacks, seeming to mature rather than to unfold, yet strangely bent on "seeking the silence" between, or beneath, words instead of moving forward. Syntax (hyperbaton, apposition, dislocation, etc.) and rhythm conspire against the teleological progression of meaning in George Mackay Brown's poetry. What is encouraged instead is a contemplative stasis which lets new, unexpected layers of signification gradually emerge from that welcomed in-betweenness.
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halshs-00795940, version 1 (01-03-2013)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-00795940 , version 1

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Dominique Delmaire. Indirection and meaning in the poems of George Mackay Brown. Congrès de la SAES, atelier Poets and Poetry, May 2011, Paris, France. ⟨halshs-00795940⟩
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