Blason
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The terms "blason", "blasonner", "blasonneur" were used in 16th century French literature by poets who, following Clement Marot in 1536, practised a genre of poems that praised a woman by singling out different parts of her body and finding appropriate metaphors to compare them with. It is still being used with that meaning in literature and especially in poetry.
It reunites the eulogy, or the satire (then called contreblason) of a being or an object. Most commonly, the object of the poem is the female body, or a part therof.
Blason originally comes from a heraldic term in French heraldry and means either the codified description of a coat of arms or the coat of arms itself. One famous example of such a poem outside of France, ironically rejecting each proposed stock metaphor, is William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130:
Blason populaire is a phrase in which one culture or ethnic group increases its own self-esteem by belittling others eg. Samuel Johnson's description that "The noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!" The term originated from Alfred Canel's travelogue Blason Populaire de la Normandie (1859), in which people from Normandy boasted about themselves while sneering at other regions.
The genre was revived in the twentieth century, when it was taken up by Paul Éluard (« Blason des fleurs et des fruits »), Georges Brassens (« Le Blason ») and André Breton (« Clair de terre »).
