The Poetry of Paul Fort

Richard Aldington

It is said that there are only three honors in the world really worth accepting. The first is that of Pope of Rome, the second Prime Minister of England and the third Prince des Poètes. Monsieur Paul Fort is Prince des poètes, a sort of unofficial title conferred upon him by the affection and admiration of the young poets of Paris. Paul Verlaine, Stephen Mallarmé and Leon Dierx were M. Fort’s successors, and in the ballot which took place when he was elected M. Henry de Régnier was an excellent second.

Paul Fort is indeed a prince of poets, the essence and the type of the poetic personality, princely in the extraordinary generosity with which he scatters largess of poetry and princely in his disdain for any occupation but that of poet. If I were king of England I believe I would ask Paul Fort to be my Prime Minister, but he would refuse, for he has a better and more interesting kingdom of his own. He should have been Grand Vizier to Haroun-al-Raschid, and when the Sultan went to war or to love, when he was idle or busy, vainglorious or craven, happy or sad, wanton or grave, M. Fort, Grand Vizier, would have made a poem to express or correct the Sultan’s mood.

Critics are fond of making epigrams on Paul Fort. They say he is “genius pure and simple”; that he has a nature continually active and awake. It would be simpler to say he is a poet. Everything he lives, everything he sees, everything he hears or smells or touches or experiences is matter for poetry. Everything from Louis XI. to the “joli crottin d’or” goes into his varied subtle rhythms. He is the only living poet who can gracefully introduce his own name into a poem without appearing ridiculous. He is continually interested in himself and notes with pleasure the interest of others:

“Cinq, six, sept, huit enfants me suivent très curieux du long nez éclairant la cape au noir velours, ‘de ce monsieur tombé de la lune, avec des yeux de merlan frit!’ dit l’un d’entre eux.”

He writes that in the midst of a poem describing a visit to the village of Coucy-le-Chateau. I have no doubt thousands of other people have been to Coucy-le-Chateau, among them many poets, but Paul Fort is the first to make a poem of it:

There you have the “familiar style” over which so many gallons of ink have been shed. Observe how perfectly naturally the author speaks of “Paul Fort”; can you hear Tennyson doing it, or Keats or Francis Thompson or the disciples of Brunetière? One might make a pleasant little literary sketch on poets who possess the familiar style to the extent of using their own names in their verse. Thus, that admirable man, Browning:

And old Walt:

It is, at least, agreeable to find poets who consider themselves as human beings instead of very inflated, somewhat simian demi-gods. Better a thousand times have desperate vulgarity than the New England pose au Longfellow and Emerson, or the still more horrible old England pose au Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley. Heaven preserve me from saying M. Fort is vulgar, but if to hate pomposity and moral pretentiousness be vulgar, then let us be vulgar, as M. Fort is. Better be obscene than a ninny.

Those who have not read M. Fort’s work and who suspect from the foregoing quotations that he is really a prose writer impudently palming off his productions as “sweet poesy,” are asked to read the following poem with attention:

LA RONDE

That is said, I don’t know with what truth, to be the most popular of M. Fort’s poems. It certainly was, I am told, in everybody’s mouth in Paris when it was first published—rather as Dolores was in London in the sixties. The cadence of the poem is, of course, obvious and marked, as it should be in a “chanson.” It is rather a good poem to start on, as M. Fort’s way of printing rhymed and accented verse as prose is there forcibly exemplified. M. Fort has not abandoned the Alexandrine; but he is not its slave. Confident in his theory that most poetry is a matter of typography he writes rhymed alexandrines, rhymed vers libres and rhymed and unrhymed prose in exactly the same manner; the effect is curious and charming. It is of course not the very commonplace device of daily newspapers when they want to be funny, but a genuine artistic principle. The effect is very different from that received from a perusal of tedious quatrains written as prose; in the latter case one is disgusted immediately, knowing that no man, not even a paid journalist, is such a fool as to write such stuff in prose; in M. Fort’s case the typographical arrangement prevents the ear becoming fatigued with the stressed rhymes of linear verse and at the same time gives a richness to the apparent prose that no real prose possesses.

For example, this quotation from the Roman de Louis XI., one of Paul Fort’s finest poem-novels.

Comtes, barons, chevaliers, capitaines, tous gentilshommes de grand façon, et le plus fier, le plus grand, le plus beau, Charles de Charolais, qui les dépassait tous, entrèrent un beau matin d’azur pure et de cloches, dans Rouen, la bonne ville, et c’était doux plaisir de voir briller les casques, les cuirasses et les housses; les belles housses, de fin drap d’or étaient, et d’autres de velours, fourrées de pennes d’hermine, et d’autres de damas, fourrées de zibeline, et d’autres, qui coûtaient moult cher, d’orfèvrerie; et c’était doux plaisir de voir courir les pages, les beaux jeunes enfants bien richement vêtus, et le voir danser, devant les personnages, des hommes en sauvages et de belles femmes nues, et sautiller autour des chevaux, en cadence, des nains rouges, roses, verts, et des filles en bergère, et de voir flotter aux toits les étandards bleus, semés de feux d’or, rouges, avec un lion noir, qui se mêlaient avec les bannières toutes blanches, et de voir venir de la cathédrale, sur le parvis, le clergé violet, venir à la rencontre du roi Louis le pâle, que représentait un si beau comte, et le ciel bleu passait dans les clochers à jour, toutes les cloches battaient, de joie ou de douleur, que les crosses luisaient! que les lances étaient belles!... et c’était doux plaisir d’aller voir les fontaines jeter vin, hypocras, dont chacun buvait; et y avait encore trois belles sirènes, nues sur une estrade, comme Ève au paradis, et jouaient d’instruments doux, jolis et graves, qui rendaient de suaves et grandes mélodies; et c’étaient sur le grand pont, sur la Seine, écuyers lâchant oisels peints en bleu, et dans toute la ville c’étaient moult plaisances, dont le tout avait coûté moult finance.

I quote that long passage in full to give a clear notion of M. Fort’s extraordinary fertility and precision in description. It is better than Hugo’s descriptions in Notre Dame de Paris, chiefly because it is more natural and familiar.

In this little article I have barely touched the rim of Paul Fort’s work. He is prodigious; he is not one poet, he is twelve, a whole school of poets; he is his own disciples, for none dares to imitate him, just as none dares to imitate Browning. He is the poet who has written everything: Chansons, Romans, Petites Epopées, Lieds, Elégies, Hymnes, Hymnes Héroiques, Eglogues et Idylles, Chants Paniques, Poèmes Marins, Odes et Odelettes, Fantaisies à la Gauloise, Complaintes et Dits, Madrigaux et Romances, Epigrammes à Moi-même. If he has not written plays, he has been a theater director, producing work which delighted literary Paris and annoyed the “boulevardiers”—this at a fabulously early age.

It may interest some readers to know what M. Fort has been doing since the war. He is an inhabitant of Rheims, born opposite the beautiful “cathédrale assassinée”; and he sits in a room at 125 Boulevard St. Germain writing, writing, poems against the invading Germans, poems to cheer on his heroic countrymen, poems mourning friends fallen on the battlefield, poems against H. I. M. the Kaiser, against the Prussian officers, against the “Monstrueux général baron von Plattenberg” (commanding the army which bombarded Rheims), poems to the English, to Joffre, and on the Battle of the Marne. The odd thing is that they are so good. I quote this one, from national vanity:

LA MANIERE[1]

ON meurt: l’Anglais s’élance et le Français le suit.... Il bondit, le Français!... L’Anglais court apres lui.... L’Anglais vif le rattrape. Qui, c’est même vaillance. Il me revient un mot, la fleur des mots guerriers. L’Anglais stoppe, et avec une grâce de France: “Messieurs de France, à vous de tirer les premiers.”