Communicating Enlightenment in ephemeral poetry: subversion, sociability and gossip
in 18th-century poésies fugitives
Dr Roman Kuhn joined us from the Freie Universität Berlin as British Academy Newton
International Fellow. He is pursuing a research project on 18th-century poésie fugitive,
occasional poetry that ‘escaped’ from the author’s (or recipient’s) portfolio and was circulated
to a broader audience in print or manuscript.
Read Roman’s
blogs on his
project so far
Above: François-Félix
Nogaret, Le Fond du sac
ou restant des babioles de
M. X.*** Membre éveillé de
l’Académie des Dormans.
À Venise [Paris]: Chez
Pantalon-Phébus [Cazin],
1780. All things ephemeral
in this illustration (soap
bubbles, mayflies, rainbow,
etc.) as well as the title of the
publication, Le Fond du sac,
and the section-title ‘pièces
fugitives, ou riens’ make
for a carefully constructed
semblance of negligence.
Right: Roman Kuhn in the
Voltaire Lab (photography
©Keiko Ikeuchi)
18th-century poésie
fugitive is elusive in more
than one way. First,
the poems themselves
are (or pretend to be)
ephemeral creations,
anchored in a more or less
private sociable setting.
And second, and more
importantly, it is not evident how to conceptually pin
down this type of poetry. Diderot, in the Encyclopédie,
characterised ‘pièces fugitives’ as texts that are
circulated first in manuscript and within a restricted
circle of readers and only later are disseminated to a
wider audience; they are, to use a modern term, texts
that are ‘leaked’ to the public. Diderot’s definition is
one that focuses almost exclusively on the production
and publication of fugitive verse and prose. At the same
time, poésie fugitive has acquired a generic meaning,
signifying ‘light verse’, no matter how it was produced,
disseminated and published.
No less challenging than the conceptual fuzziness is
the sheer volume. Poésies fugitives come en masse
and can be found at various locations: dedicated
recueils de poésies, anthologies, journals (the Mercure
de France has a separate section for poésie fugitive),
as an appendix to more substantial works, etc. Poésie
fugitive infiltrates almost all areas and markets within
the print sphere; it is practised by celebrities like
Voltaire, whose fugitive poetry is a coveted material
throughout the 18th century, as well as by minor and
virtually unknown poets.
The project aims to reconstruct this type of poetry
both conceptually and historically. Working with
contemporary reflections on the genre (if it is a
genre) and the poetics embedded within the poems
themselves, it tries to reconstruct the use and
development of this conceptual domain of poetry.
Another aim is to reconstruct the networks created
by fugitive poetry. As an eminently sociable form of
literature it connects poets and their audience; as a
short form that lends itself to being published and
republished, collected, transcribed and disseminated
in various ways, it also shows networks of publication
and text reuse.
The term poésie fugitive, interestingly, is used almost
exclusively in France with no direct equivalents in
other European languages and literatures. This,
however, does not mean that the literary
practice across Europe did not develop
comparable phenomena all over the
continent. A symposium held in spring 2024
will bring together specialists on diferent
European literatures in order to consider the
international dimension of fugitive poetry
and discuss afnities as well as diferences
between European literatures.
VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23 | 7