Didactics of poetry in secondary schools

The didactics of French are a matter of concern in Africa and in Cameroon. The question of learning poetry illustrates this. There is, in fact, a gap between the poetic genre and the learners. For the latter, poetry is a real mystery. In other words, it’s complex, its language hermetic. In this vein, Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur (1926), included in the Terminales littéraires program, is difficult to understand. A look at the syllabus reveals that current methods are ill-suited to the didactics of Surrealist poetry. It is heavily influenced by the classical trend, due to the marginalization of the gap in the study of contemporary poetry. The major challenge is to find a method that is adapted to the study of contemporary poetic text and that can enable learners to understand today’s poetry: hence Michael RIFFATERRE’s semiopoetics based on the interpretation of agrammaticalities.