The Comic as Poetry: Bergson Revisited

Bergson's Le Rire separates comic and lyric; modern poets combine them. Bergson describes tone mixtures, surprise word plays, self-conscious language, etc. – all poetic today. Bergson remains limited by body/soul, subject/object, word/idea, artifice/natural assumptions but approaches synthesis of comic and poetic in examples and inconsistencies. Illustrations: treatment of dreams, Don Quixote. Cf. Baudelaire, Freud, Frye. (LJ)