Continents manuscrits (Oct 2024)
De quelques poèmes soi-disant perdus
Abstract
The manuscript pages of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Poèmes divers and Poèmes perdus invite us to rethink the author’s poetics on a rhapsody mode, both from the point of view of the movement of its genesis and the genesis of its style. The foreword proves that Senghor wrote and then kept poems written between 1928 and 1935, originally intended as a single collection. When they were actually published, he did not hesitate to act as a rhapsode, splitting, duplicating and stitching together rewritten poetic sequences. The manuscripts also bear witness to the author’s search for a poetic path that would enable him to become a cantor, a rhapsode of epic and lyrical material dedicated to love and negritude. This poetic ethos seems to try out three directions: a desire for decontextualization and generalization; a tension between borrowing and self-affirmation; and finally, a desire for concentration and reconfiguration of meaning.
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