From the Art de Dictier to the Poetic Art: The Lyrical Voice

Abstract

Abstract Eustache Deschamps writes in 1392 his Art de Dictier, an art of writing (ars dictandi) and, according to its added title, an art of “making songs, balads, virelais and rondeaux.” He introduces it, therefore, as a versification treatise that is exemplary for his generation of nonmusician poets, unlike Machaut, his most probable initiator into metrics. In so doing he introduces the concept of natural music, a genre proper to inspire poets for whom lyrical musicality is entirely produced by poetic language alone. Without perceiving, perhaps, the novelty of this poetic aesthetics, he thus opens the avenue for a new poetry, freed from Rhetorics and from added music, more precisely for a poetic art.