Appropriation and Revision as Subversion in Intermèdes: Krysinska’s Palimpsests

Abstract

ABSTRACT Marie Kysinska was a pioneer of French free verse, but her detractors characterized her work as derivative. Responding to them, her last collection, Intermèdes: Nouveaux rythmes pittoresques (1903), distances her poetry from its sources of inspiration. Although Intermèdes is replete with borrowed material—from pieces that Krysinska published earlier and from contemporaries' works—Krysinska's appropriations consistently subvert traditions. This article examines poems that indicate how Krysinska's revisions of her own texts and palimpsests of others' works renovate literary conventions. The following readings illustrate the intellectual independence that Krysinska asserted as her career advanced and her efforts to transform inherited paradigms.