Poeticity

You seem to think that the whole virtue of tragedy lies in its poeticity; and the softer, the sweeter, the more soul-soothing, the more hushing the poetry is, the better you think it, though the audience go to sleep under your noses.

Faguet answers Voltaire’s remarks upon the famous couplet of Rodogune: “Il est des noeuds secrets, il est des sympathies . . .” to the effect that “the poet is always himself talking and that passion does not thus express itself,” by saying that people are accustomed to express themselves in this way, that is to say, in the form of general ideas, when they are calm, as though the question could be settled with an appeal to the reality of ordinary life, whereas on the contrary it is a question of poeticity, that is to say, of the tragic situation, which by its own nature, excludes couplets in certain cases, however well turned they be.

There are few pages which present no obscurity by traditional standards, and the novel reads as a long poem. The poeticity of My Lovely Enemy is underlined by the frequent use of quotations from poems, making the novel an actual ‘collage.’