Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle Amanda Lowry French Charlottesville, VA B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1992, cum laude M.A., Concentration in Women's Studies, University of Virginia, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August 2004 ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ABSTRACT Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle's nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat's "Villanelle" ("J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle"), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only Renaissance example of this form. My own research has discovered that the nineteenth-century "revival" of the villanelle stems from an 1844 treatise by a little- known French Romantic poet-critic named Wilhelm Ténint. My study traces the villanelle first from its highly mythologized origin in the humanism of Renaissance France to its deployment in French post-Romantic and English Parnassian and Decadent verse, then from its bare survival in the period of high modernism to its minor revival by mid-century modernists, concluding with its prominence in the polyvocal culture wars of Anglophone poetry ever since Elizabeth Bishop’s "One Art" (1976). The villanelle might justly be called the only fixed form of contemporary invention in English; contemporary poets may be attracted to the form because it connotes tradition without bearing the burden of tradition. Poets and scholars have neither wanted nor needed to know that the villanelle is not an archaic, foreign form. The introduction documents the current popularity of the nineteen-line fixed-form villanelle in Anglophone poetry and its absence in Francophone poetry. The first chapter focuses on Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle," offering a history, collation, interpretation, and new translation of this ignored original villanelle. The second chapter describes the highly politicized aesthetic context of nineteenth-century French and English post-Romanticism, when professional poet-critics Théodore de Banville and Edmund Gosse claimed a false history for the villanelle. The third chapter examines the low status of the French forms in the period of high modernism and the Great War, discussing works by Joyce and Pound as well as patriotic poems. The fourth chapter explores the sources of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" and its influence on later poets, especially Elizabeth Bishop. The conclusion places the villanelle firmly within the context of contemporary professional poetry culture. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT................................................................................................................... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS................................................................................................iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................v PERMISSIONS........................................................................................................... viii INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................10 CHAPTER ONE: The Lost Turtledove..........................................................................31 CHAPTER TWO: Young Men of Talent .......................................................................62 CHAPTER THREE: Ardent Ways...............................................................................109 CHAPTER FOUR: Grave Truths, Grave Men .............................................................149 CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................185 APPENDIX I: Anthologies Examined .........................................................................193 APPENDIX II: List of Villanelles................................................................................199 APPENDIX III: Historical Collation of Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" ............228 APPENDIX IV: Comparisons......................................................................................240 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................241 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could scarcely believe how simultaneously comfortable and productive the first meeting of my dissertation committee was. My advisor, Professor Stephen Cushman, introduced me to the villanelle and to the work of Elizabeth Bishop in his superb lectures for History of Twentieth-Century Literature in English, and his Fictions of Form was highly important to my thinking. He also took me on as a dissertation student when I half expected him to turn me down, and when he was very busy with other commitments. Like Professor Cushman, my second reader, Professor Mark Edmundson, gave me by example the courage to be unfashionably individualist in my scholarship with great books like Nightmare on Main Street and Teacher. He also came to hear me play the guitar once, which was cool. Professor Lisa Russ Spaar of the Creative Writing Program offered a friendly ear and insight into the culture of creative writing, and Professor Mary McKinley of the French Department was particularly indispensable when I was preparing to write Chapter One. Professor Alison Booth was a role model from the very first. Professor Jerome McGann offered advice on directions for a project and read my attempts to formulate one. Professor David Vander Meulen first introduced me to the principles of bibliography and was no less than essential to the development of the historical collation that forms Appendix III. Professor Michael Bishop of Dalhousie University at Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada answered my questions on contemporary French poetry via e-mail. Professor Julie Kane of Northwestern State University at Natchitoches in Lousiana wrote a great dissertation that sparked my imagination, wrote a great manuscript of poetry that ditto, vi and wrote me very fully and satisfyingly back when I wrote to her, which she certainly didn't have to do. The English Department gave me employment as well as education for many years: first as a work-study student with office jobs, research assistantships, and graderships, then as a graduate instructor. In conjunction with the Teaching + Technology Initiative, they funded my position as Teaching with Technology Support Partner for three years. The Rossetti Archive and the Electronic Text Center at Alderman Library also gave me paid work marking up texts in SGML and XML. The UVa branch of the Minority Medical Education Program gave me summer work for four years teaching medical school applicants to write personal essays for their medical school applications. Every single one of these jobs did more than pay the bills; all of them were challenging and enjoyable and sometimes moving, and all of them gave me much to ponder about life and language and the relationship between them. The Interlibrary Loan office at the University of Virginia Library labored tirelessly on my behalf. The University of Virginia Library in general amazed me with its seemingly endless resources—its stacks, its Special Collections, its diverse services, and its technological sophistication. The OCLC FirstSearch database WorldCat and the Eureka RLG Union Catalog (formerly the RLIN Bibliographic File) seemed omniscient. ISIResearchSoft's bibliographic software program EndNote organized and formatted everything for me; I can't imagine working without it. Michelle Allen, June Griffin, Elizabeth Outka, Lisa Spiro, and Virginia Zimmerman (now all anointed Ph.D.s!) held my hand patiently through several years of a vii project that I eventually chose to abandon; my memories of that project are now colored with distaste, but my memories of our dissertation group are green and gold, like spinach and garlic, and are some of the best memories of my life. Gangs of women dedicated to a professional vocation are too rare; the members of that group all know how special those meetings were. My close friends Margaret Gardiner, Danny Schmidt, Janus Raphaelidis, Jan Smith, Browning Porter, Jeff Romano, Paul Curreri, and Devon Sproule, on the other hand, might not know that they've enriched my intellectual life every bit as much as they have my social life. I appreciate and admire their talents, their ambitions, their principles, and their constancy more than I can say. Finally, I would like to thank my mother: firstly that she conceived me, secondly that she bore me, thirdly that she raised me, fourthly that she also did all the same for my beloved brother Sam, fifthly that she discreetly supplemented my income when I needed it (which was often), and lastly because she is in her own right an energetic, generous woman with the strength to start all over again. PERMISSIONS Professor Phillip K. Jason granted permission to reprint his English translation of Jean Passerat's "Villanelle" ("J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle"), which originally appeared in his article "Modern Versions of the Villanelle," College Literature 7 (1980). Robert S. Means, English and American Literature Librarian of the Brigham Young University Library granted permission