Kosovel: A Great Poet But a Poor Prosodist

Abstract

Formally, the majority of Kosovel’s early poems, which Slovenian literary history has unsatisfactorily labelled “impressionist lyrical poetry”, fall within the framework of traditional versification; more precisely, they belong to the period of its disintegration and demise. Awkward in prosody, young Kosovel somewhat weakened traditional accentual-syllabic versification, thus bringing it closer to free verse. – In these poems, Kosovel’s poetic language is very simple: verse rhythm is derivative of the most common and popular meters taken from a long tradition, the verse endings are marked by hackneyed, unoriginal rhymes, and the poems are usually divided into the most prevalent stanza structure (mainly quatrains). – Particularly interesting is Kosovel’s use of rhyme: his rhyming dictionary is, in fact, extremely poor, with a prevalence of so-called verbal rhymes. (Of all the parts of speech in the Slovenian language, verbs are the easiest to rhyme because of their corresponding inflections, and easily-formed rhymes tend to be semantically – and thereby musically – poor.) It is as though Kosovel were endlessly repeating the rhymes he had learnt from the poetic canon of 19^th century Slovenian poetry. For any other, less talented, poet of Kosovel’s time, drawing on such a familiar and worn-out domestic stock of rhyme endings would be a clear sign of a grossly sentimental and conservative poetics. Not so with Kosovel: in his verse, these rhymes, a hundred times used and abused, suddenly ring out in a different, fresh, and artistically authentic way. Kosovel surpassed the weakness of his versification by repeating his mistakes: a repeated mistake is no longer a mistake; it is already a system. A silent, but a deep and far-reaching break was effected within the traditional versification: even these inherited rhythms and rhymes were endowed with new sounds and meaning through a different usage of poetic language (for in poetry, sound and meaning are always closely bound together). – In short, this segment of Kosovel’s poetry offers plenty of textbook examples which show that great poetry does not necessarily rest on skillful versification. Srečko Kosovel is a poor prosodist, but a great poet. Fortunately, in poetry, versification is not everything. Moreover, versification undergoes significant changes through time, and Kosovel’s example demonstrates that the shortcomings within one aesthetic system can become advantages in the next.