The Notion of “Poem” in Dominique Combe: Revisiting the Long Poem and the Narrative Poem

Abstract

Dominique Combe has approached the recent trajectory of the epic in the West referring to poets such as Saint-John-Perse, Pound, Glissant. Considering these cases, he assumes the pertinence of a certain question of the epic in the recent theoretical reflection on poetry. He also emphasizes that the theoretical refusal of the presence of the epic or its transformations in Modernity implies parallel aspects such as the maintenance of a certain tradition of dissociation between poem and narration. This would have direct relations with the history of French poetry (and with a certain theory of this same poetry). His studies highlight, finally, possibilities of interweaving a certain epic nostalgia and the maintenance of lyricism. Such questions seem to contribute to a broader movement of reflections on specific “poems” recovering narrative elements. Such poems can be longer and sometimes dialogue with the epic tradition. The purpose of this essay is to indicate how such considerations seem to raise pertinent questions also for the reflection on poetry written in Portuguese.