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Why did so many poets attempt English verse in Ancient Greek and Latin metres during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And what was at stake in these attempts? The most immediate importance of these questions to literary criticism is the fact that they mark one of the most striking and consistent points of contiguity between the verse-forms — and poetic theories — of poets commonly categorised as ‘Modernists’ and ‘Victorians’. This study uncovers a lineage of experimentation with classical metres connecting Algernon Charles Swinburne to Ezra Pound and H. D., in the process challenging received periodizations of English verse-history. The assumption that vers libre and metrical verse constitute alternate and incompatible paradigms prevents us from being able to perceive, in either of them, the endless performative possibilities that rhythm offers us — possibilities which, as I intend to demonstrate, underpin some of the period’s most influential experiments in verse-form. My close studies of these poetic forms raise another question: what is the ontological status of these poetic forms that pass through multiple languages and millennia? I frame my readings of English poetry in classical measures through the metaphor of the ghost because English poetry can only encounter classical metres as a kind of spectral or incomplete presence. I refer to this encounter, borrowing a term from Jacques Derrida, as ‘hauntology’: a situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction that occurs when a being or entity, apparently present, is revealed to be an absent or continually-deferred (non-)origin. The hauntological character of English poems in classical measures is due not only to fundamental differences between the syntaxes and phonologies of Ancient Greek, Latin, and English, but also to the loss of knowledge concerning the traditions and conventions of metrical performance in Ancient Greek and Latin. This is why writing English poetry in classical metres generally poses a far greater challenge — both technically and conceptually — than writing English poetry in the metres of a living language: recreating classical metres in English requires reimagining the very nature of the encounter between poems and bodies, while also facing up to the quasi-magical charge that ‘the classical’ holds in the English literary imagination.

Ce travail propose une étude de la poétique de la douleur, tant physique et morale, dans certaines œuvres choisies de la poésie grecque archaïque et classique. Il démontre comment la douleur remplit une fonction essentielle dans les œuvres étudiées, en tant que moteur de l’action et mode de caractérisation des personnages, ainsi que par les liens qu’elle établit avec les thèmes centraux plus larges. L’étude de la poétique à proprement parler permet par ailleurs d’examiner en arrière-plan la question historico-culturelle de la valeur éthique et sociale de la douleur. Trois œuvres servent de cas d’étude: l’Iliade d’Homère (le livre V en particulier), l’Orestie d’Eschyle (principalement l’Agamemnon), et le Philoctète de Sophocle. Le premier chapitre traite de la douleur divine dans l’Iliade, en contraste avec celle des simples mortels. Le deuxième chapitre propose de réexaminer la question de la douleur et du chagrin de la perte dans l’Orestie d’Eschyle, en portant une attention particulière à la nature perverse de la souffrance maternelle de Clytemnestre. Le troisième et dernier chapitre examine la représentation de la douleur dans le Philoctète de Sophocle, et le caractère ambigu de la souffrance du héros, en analysant comment celle-ci sert à la fois de menace et de catalyseur de l’humanité de la victime souffrante elle-même et de ses témoins. / The present study offers an exploration of selected representations of physical and moral pain in archaic and classical Greek poetry, with a focus on the poetics. The analysis centers on the extent to which depictions of pain fulfill a central role in the works selected, as motor of the plot, instrumental mode of characterization, and link to key overarching themes. In the course of the examination of its poetic function, the cultural-historical question of pain’s ethical and social value emerges as a dominant background axis of investigation. Three works serve as case studies: the Homeric Iliad (book V in particular), Aeschylus’ Oresteia (mainly the Agamemnon), and Sophocles’ Philoctetes. The first chapter deals with the portrayal of divine pain in the Iliad, by contrasting it with that of mortals. The second chapter seeks to offer a better understanding of the portrayals of pain and loss in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, with particular focus on the perverse nature of Clytemnestra’s maternal suffering. The third and final chapter turns to the representation of pain in Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the ambivalence of the eponymous hero’s suffering, analyzing how it serves both as a threat and a catalyst to the humanity of the sufferer himself and that of his witnesses.