The Ladder of High Designs

This work examines the relation of individual poems to the book of poetry as a whole in collections of French lyric poetry from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The contributors address the means by which a body of discrete and self contained poems coalesce into a cohesive unit organized by the poet and not by outside editors or compilers. Although widely divergent in their approaches, the contributors explore how poets resolve the problem of creating a work from a varied poetic production without subordinating the essence of their production, the lyric utterance, to the arrangement that they adopt. Because the essays included here deal with a variety of works from the Middle Ages to the present, historical concepts of order and coherence emerge as essential elements of changing form; poetic collections appear to respond both to earlier forms and to a current sense of order or disorder, continuity or discontinuity.