Aragon, the lyrical epic and the fate of the lyrical

Our time, along with the atom and space, despite automated production and despotic regimes, has imposed an indisputable cult: man. Renaissance humanism is an unparalleled pathetic glorification of the complete real man, universally and comprehensively developed", but it is inferior in depth to the analyses that contemporary art makes of man, who proved incapable of harmony in the bourgeois era. The interest in the intimate world of the individual, the awareness of the role of the subject, of his multifaceted, inexhaustible soulfulness, bring to literature a flow of lyricism that neither drama nor epic can resist. Although the novel - this "form of transcendental helplessness (G. Lukács), with its amorphousness and incompleteness, and drama - this ideally and existentially tense genre (E. Zeiger) with its pathetic or problematic conflict, have proven, according to most theorists, to be the most suitable for recreating the reality of modern man, the fate of the lyrical" does not cease to concern specialists and is intertwined with the practice of the "epic" and the "dramatic". The frequent observations that lyric poetry is the least popular today, that modern man and modern society are alien to the lyrical - are hasty and erroneous. Statistics show that in recent years interest in lyrical creativity has been resurging, and literary studies prove that it itself is undergoing significant evolution. In France, for example, last year there were from twenty to fifty thousand poets! (Nouvelle Critique magazine, No. 158/1964). A large number of youth poetry magazines are being published and are gaining popularity. Pocket editions began to publish Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Eluard, Aragon in mass circulation. In a short time, several poetic manifestos appeared: "Poetry to Live" by Jean Breton and Serge Brando, "The Manifesto" by Pierre Garnier, etc., which, together with "Word and Vertigo" by Alain Bosquet, the discussion of the magazine "Tel Kel" on poetry (No. 17), etc., testify to an effort to limit and explain the guiding principles of a "new" poetry.