'L'art verbal des poètes-peintres: the text/image problem In the context of Blake's ‘Infant Sorrow’ as analysed by Roman Jakobson in L'art verbal des poètes-peintres Blake) Rousseau et Klee

Abstract

Jakobson's point of departure in L'art verbal des poètes-peintres Blake, Rousseau et Klee, signalled by a quotation from Blake, is that in a poem or in a picture structurally all is significant, down to the last detail. In the section on Blake's poem from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ‘Infant Sorrow’, Jakobson discovers striking patterns of symmetry in the verse and stanzaic forms, syntactic and morphological structure, phonetic and punctuational patterns, and in the interrelationship between these domains. According to Jakobson, this high degree of ‘geometric’ organization on the part of the poet is a function of Blake the artist's powers of pictorial composition, and leads Jakobson to reaffirm ‘l'analogie remarquable entre le rôle de la grammaire en poésie et, chez le peintre, les regles de la composition fondees sur un ordre géométrique latent ou manifeste, ou au contraire sur une revolte contre tout agencement géométrique'.1 No actual comparison is, however, made by Jakobson between Blake's text and the illustrative page into which it is set. What such a comparison might lead one to affirm, and why such a comparison was not made by Jakobson, will be the subject of a section below. Furthermore, Jakobson does not place this poem in the larger context of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) and its partner poem, ‘Infant Joy’. This is because Jakobson's main aim in analysing ‘Infant Sorrow’ is to assert the high degree of organization - grammatical, formal, phonetic, etc. — of the poète-peintre's text. On this basis Jakobson will proceed, in the second section of his essay, to discover specific structural parallels between the painting and the verse accompanying Douanier Rousseau's Le Rêve. Only at the end of this section will the general point of Jakobson's project in this essay be spelled out, through a quotation from Carola Giedion-Welcker's study on Klee (1946) in which she claims that ‘le poete est inseparable du peintre’ (Jakobson, p. 152). This quotation gives Jakobson, the cue to pursue in the third and final section of his essay a structural analysis of Klee's poem ‘Zwei berge … ‘. Jakobson's analysis leads him to discover in Klee's poem ‘un des sin spatial, purement métaphorique, d'une facture biblique’ (Jakobson, p. 155) and to construct a schematic diagram showing the ‘etonnante union de transparence radieuse, de savante simplicité et d'imbrication multiforme [qui] permet, chez Klee, au peintre comme au poète, de deployer une harmonieuse combinaison de procédés, surprenants par leur variété, aussi bien sur un morceau de toile que dans quelques lignes d'unJournal’ (Jakobson, p. 159). Jakobson's second schematic diagram of the poem (Jakobson, p. 155) in particular is organized in such a way as to mimic the asymmetrical semi-geometrical structure of many of Klee's drawings and paintings. In this way, Jakobson aims to convince the reader of the profound analogy between poetic composition and pictorial structure.