Le rêve claudélien de l’ ïambe: retour sur l’“Orestie”

It is possible to detect in Paul Claudel’s poetry a metric rhythm inherited from Antiquity, which sometimes appears in contrast to some of the poet’s fanciful assertions. Claudel did not really apply a system to his language, and his theory of the iambus is not really a theory in the full sense of the term if we consider his very personal use of metrics. If he rejects any “hypermetric and corseted” system, something of his listening to Greek metrics remains in his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which transposes the tragic trimeter into French verse, and maybe also in the Five Great Odes.