Erik Satie's Poetry

This article is the first literary critical analysis of Satie's poetry. It starts from his Trois poemes d'amour, whose verse form and musical setting place exaggerated emphasis on the 'e muet' of feminine rhymes. The 'e muet' and sounds connoted as feminine play an equally important role in Satie's 'drame symphonique' Socrate: they suggest a symbolist prolongation of the voice beyond the point where its function is to make sense, as it fades into music or silence. Playing the conventions of verse against those of musical notation, Satie configures a poet whose problems of self-expression become those of poetry itself.