Keel ja Kirjandus (Jun 2024)
Artur Alliksaare alliteratiivsed arhetüübid
Abstract
The article explores the free-verse poetics of Artur Alliksaar (1923–1966), Estonia’s foremost poet of language. Alliksaar faced poverty and repression under the Soviet regime, making it challenging to publish his work. A small selection of his poems were published as a book only posthumously. Nonetheless, Alliksaar’s influence on the poetry revival of the 1960s and the emerging generation of poets was profound. Estonian poetry and the language itself have been forever altered by his volcanic inspiration. In the late 1950s, Estonia witnessed a fierce debate over free verse: while the official stance favoured conservative metrical forms, the younger generation championed formal and substantive freedom. Alliksaar initially wrote in elegant metrical forms like sonnets and rhymed quatrains, but by 1960, he too embraced free verse. The article suggests that he drew inspiration from Walt Whitman’s prose-like long lines, which he meticulously instrumented and enriched with figurative devices, resulting in an unprecedented, baroque orchestration. Alliksaar held deep reverence for the poetics of Estonian runic verse and consistently employed alliteration and open parallelism in his compelling associative compositions. His impressive arsenal includes all manners of figurative devices drawn from folklore and baroque rhetoric: sound devices, tropes, and figures – often used hyperbolically and comically. Unprecedented in Estonian poetry is the flood of linguistic wizardry: diverse repetitions, extended metaphors and metalepses, catachrestic contrasts and systematic antitheses, paradoxical puns, echoes and chiasms, refined vocabulary and ad hoc neologisms, rhetorical syntax, and graphic articulation. It could be argued that Alliksaar’s volcanic alliterative innovation finds its archetype in the free-verse-like primal structure of proto-accentual chants and lamentations that preceded quantitative runic verse.
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