Bringing in one’s verses “the remains of a new world” Stylistic analysis of the formal cosmopolitanism in A.O. Barnabooth’s Poésies

In this article, we will illustrate what seems to us to be an effect of metrical subversion generated by the incursion of geographical novelties on the rhythmic potentialities of Valery Larbaud’s free verse, by taking up the intuition of David Elwyn Evans according to whom the integrity of the alexandrin verse is, in certain cases, disrupted by an extranational element. We will analyze a series of examples taken from the 1913 edition of A.O.’s Barnabooth Poems, in which a correspondence between the metric plan and the semantic plan is manifested: these are in fact verses which contain references to a “new world”, to exotic components testifying of a modern cosmopolitanism even at the formal level.