La métaphore dans la poésie de Jean Cocteau : un hommage à Picasso

Abstract

The beginning of the 20th century, marked by upheavals in the philosophical and artistic circles, testifies a particular need to replace the reigning concepts by new ones, which would correspond to the spirit of the time, thus causing significant changes on the especially formal plan of artistic expression. In this perspective, avant-garde poetics represent an important moment in the development of the poetic language announced and established with the advent of surrealism and cubism. Indeed, the poetry of the 20th century is imbued with an intention to free language and metaphor while denouncing symbolist illusions and their decision to completely deny the material world. This enabled modern artists to express themselves in the interstice of many artistic media, while the rapprochement of poetry and painting particularly highlights the specificity of modern art. This allows us to observe the nature and characteristics of metaphor in the poetry of Jean Cocteau, paying particular attention to its pictorial aspect, which visibly refers to Picasso’s paintings. Given that Cubist art has strongly influenced, more or less explicitly, all the avant-garde literature, and that the great figures of painting, such as Picasso, dominated all the artistic currents of the time, one finds the approximation of the poet to the painter quite relevant, particularly in the field of metaphorical figuration of the poetic discourse. In Cocteau’s poetry, there are many elements referring to the pictorial universe of Picasso, which is built on a spatio-temporal hallucinatory dynamic (spatial simultaneity), fragmentarity and the aesthetics of collage.