Verbal Shape in the Poetry of Villon and Marot

Abstract

Generally speaking lyrics written in the early years of the printing press cannot be read in editions other than their own. A visual aesthetic informing the poetic texture of François Villon and Clément Marot is essential to an understanding of their work: Le Grant Testament of 1489 in gothic font and the physical shape of the epitaphs and rondeaux of the Adolescence Clémentine use in a differential manner the absence of volume on the page’s two-dimensional surface to elaborate a human drama of three dimensions. Thus their dialogue between voice and space or discourse and figure is always an open one, showing in its punctuation the areas of mediation and desire that generate great lyric poetry.