Alle origini del vers libre: il caso Marie Krysinska

Abstract

The figure of Marie Krysinska, a French poet of Polish origin who lived between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, is at the crossroads between the metrical problem of French free verse and the cultural problem of women’s place in the history of literature. After an introduction about the relation between women’s poetry and free verse in France at the end of the 19th century, this article presents Marie Krysinska and her querelle with Gustave Kahn about the invention of French free verse. The following pages aim to develop a comparison between Kahn and Krysinska from both a theoretic point of view and a poetic one, in light of the most recent studies on the evolution of French poetic forms. While on the one hand their theoretical writings show some important similarities, due to their common symbolist background, on the other hand some formal differences in their poems prove that they followed two different ways of using the free verse and explain the difficulties of understanding Krysinska’s poems. The last part of the article resumes the development of the “Krysinska case” in literary studies: violently attacked by critics at the beginning of the 20th century, forgotten by scholars for about fifty years, Krysinska has been rediscovered and reevaluated only in the nineties, and it is now possible to recognize her importance in the literary context of her time, as well as the value of her poetic production.