Images du poète en mollusque marin

This study stems from the idea that writing entails a division of the self and that the poet necessarily sees his or her own self as another. It focuses on three American poems written within a hundred year in which this “other” happens to be a sea mollusk: O. Wendell Holmes compares himself to a chambered nautilus, M. Moore to a paper nautilus and H.D. to a bivalve. The three poets appropriate the cultural inheritance filtered through shells and construct an image of themselves through an interdiscursive and interlocutive dialogism which can be either intentional or not and through oneiric associations prompted by the image of seashells. In the wake of Paul Valéry in his “Man and the Seashell”, I suggest that seashells raise naive but fundamental questions such as “who made this” or “why was that object made” which are intimately connected to any investigation of what “ethos” might be understood to be.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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