With the renewal of interest in seventeenth-century French baroque poets, a considerable number of studies have been devoted to the poetry of Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant (1594-1661). Almost without exception these works point to Saint-Amant's outstanding talent for writing descriptive, visually evocative verse. Rolfe's full-length study deals with the many ramifications of this aspect, showing that it is crucial to an understanding of the poet and his achievement.
This book, originally published in 1972 and later given the ISBN 978-0-900547-22-5, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
It is clear that the relationship between the various arts, that is to say between literature, music, painting and sculpture, is extremely intricate, confused even, and dependent on numerous factors. The aims of the poet or the novelist, the musician and the painter may coincide or they may be radically opposed. Although the means used in the creation of a poem or a painting are different, themes are clearly often the same. Moreover, one art may inspire another: paintings can and do suggest themes for poetry, plays are frequently transformed into operas and so forth. There is, however, an aspect to the relationship between the arts that is both more fascinating and more important in many respects: at various times in the history of European civilization one art has endeavoured to reproduce the effects obtained by another art. So, for example, poets have attempted to write 'musical' verse Verlaine striving to put his concept of 'de la musique avant toute chose' into practice. Or, and this is of most interest to us, certain poets have tried to achieve the effects obtained by the painter.
Perhaps the one positive aspect of Saint-Amant's poetic ability about which scholars and critics have always been in agreement is his outstanding gift for writing descriptive verse. This talent brought him renown amongst his contemporaries.
Generally speaking, poet and painter preferred serene landscapes with rivers, small woods and vales. The wilder aspects of nature — storms, hostile climates, awe-inspiring mountains and so forth — were usually shunned, as was agriculture. Sunshine sunset and sunrise were favourite themes — and water held a particular fascination.
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Saint-Amant and the Portrayal of Movement: The Sea, Ships, Battles, and Monsters Christopher D. Rolfe doi:10.59860/td.c16808f
It will be remembered that, amongst others, it was Lessing who pointed out that what the poet could really 'paint' was action, that poetry, being a temporal art, lent itself easily to the portrayal of movement. With this in mind let us now turn our attention, having discussed the way Saint-Amant treats the essentially static scenes which the countryside offers, to his descriptions involving move- ment. His poetry is, in fact, full of descriptions of action, often violent action, and of objects in motion. On reading his poetry, it becomes apparent that Saint-Amant enjoyed treating certain specific themes, themes which appear again and again and on which we will concentrate. They are water, the sea, ships, battles and combats, the latter now and then involving monsters or dangerous beasts.
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Saint-Amant and the Communication of Emotion: Moyse Sauvé Christopher D. Rolfe doi:10.59860/td.c2774d6
In Chapter 2 it was stated that Saint-Amant, wishing to give expression to the great joy experienced by the sister of Moses on seeing the baby safely delivered from a dangerous predicament, 'calls to the rescue' the famous French painter Poussin — a fact which, it was suggested, implies a tendency to think of emotion in visual terms. Several crucial questions arise from this statement. To begin with, one must ask whether Saint-Amant always attempts to express emotion visually. Or does he, on the other hand, ever turn to the other resources of poetry in order to communicate "il di dentro'? To what degree, indeed, does he succeed in portraying emotion at all? In approaching these problems we must think not only of the emotions of the various characters described within the story of Moses but also, and this is perhaps of more importance, of the emotion to be engendered in the reader, and of the poet's skill in doing this. Does he ever manage to move us? Clearly the tone of the poem will be an important factor here — to what extent does Saint-Amant's descriptive, visually evocative verse lend itself to the tone one would expect of a work which the poet calls an 'idyle heroïque'?
A good number of those critics who have written on Saint-Amant have drawn attention to a kind of kinship which exists between certain of his poems, notably his humorous poems, and Flemish and Dutch paintings of the period.
When Saint-Amant maintained, in the preface to Moyse Sauvé, that the poet should be knowledgeable about painting, he also asserted, it will be recalled, that in the interests of poetic harmony he should have a knowledge of music. Now, clearly, to neglect such a crucial remark would falsify our understanding of the poet, or, to put it another way, to merely concentrate our attention on the pictorial qualities in his poetry would certainly prevent a truly comprehensive idea of his intentions and achievements from emerging. In order, therefore, to redress the balance let us now examine the musical elements in Saint-Amant's verse. We know, in fact, that Saint-Amant himself was an accomplished musician and quite renowned amongst his contemporaries for his skill on the lute.
When, after over a century of unjust neglect, Saint-Amant was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century, it was largely due to the efforts of Théophile Gautier who devoted a chapter of his Grotesques to a spirited appraisal of his predecessor's achievement. Now, whilst we are not entitled to read too much into this — for he was to attempt to rehabilitate a number of other forgotten poets — it is nevertheless intriguing that it should have been Gautier who — having long hesitated between becoming a painter and becoming a poet and having finally compromised by making words 'paint' — was to be responsible for the revival of interest in an earlier poet-painter'. As might have been ex- pected he was particularly alive to the pictorial qualities of Saint-Amant's poetry.
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Bibliography entry:
Rolfe, Christopher D., Saint-Amant and the Theory of 'Ut Pictura Poesis', MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 6 (MHRA, 1972)
First footnote reference:35 Christopher D. Rolfe, Saint-Amant and the Theory of 'Ut Pictura Poesis', MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 6 (MHRA, 1972), p. 21.
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