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A New Relationship between Poetry and Music - music as Creative Principle of Poetry in Mallarmé's World

DO YOONJUNG 1

1인하대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explore the new relationship between music and poetry established in the beginning of the Modern Era. This was a period when reading silently was the dominant culture rather than reading aloud and orality was limited due to the emergence of literacy and print culture. A poet sensitive to the characteristics of the period, Mallarmé created his own concept of music and new creative principles of poetry from it. We analyze his 『Divigation』 and letters, in particular, the "Crisis of vers", "Music and Literature", "Mystery in the letters", and "About the book." Firstly, Mallarmé connects music with the mystery and the sacred: the mystery surrounds the music and the music is oriented with the sacred. The sanctity is that of the human race and has existed within humans since the beginning. Transposing the characteristics of this music to the poetry is his first creative principle of poetry. However, Mallarmé called music a totality of relationships that exist between objects without reducing the dimension to only the instruments or the sound. His definition is abstract, regarding music as a complete rhythm, the atmosphere and the air. Secondly, we have the question of how to realize music in a poem. As the music is surrounded by the mystery, Mallarmé can transpose the sacred to a poem in mysterious ways. This leads to his second principle of poetry: make a poem as a structure. In other words, 'musically', based on the disappearance of real objects and the initiative of the poet, he created a structure with only the words. We can create an acoustic structure but Mallarmé created a visible structure to overcome the incompleteness of the sound of a word in the diffusion of print culture. In this manner, the use of silence as much as sound and the use of visual as much as aural components were introduced in poetry as important motifs and the essentials of creation. This new relationship between poetry and music and the creative principles drawn from it appear to be the areas to which attention should be focused in the research of poetry.

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