[In the following essay, Carter surveys Verlaine 's career.]

Had anyone present at the funeral been asked why he admired the dead man, he would probably have answered that Verlaine carried on the work of Baudelaire, added new themes and techniques to French poetry, and freed it from the shackles of tradition. Such was his reputation during his last years. . . .

If we view these opinions nowadays with a rather sceptical eye it is not because they are false, but because they imply a kind of progress: that after Verlaine, and through him, French verse would be better than ever. Eighty years have passed, and such has not been the case. The exact reverse is closer to the truth: Verlaine, with [Arthur] Rimbaud and [Stéphane] Mallarmé, was the last great French poet. There have been poets in France since he lived, but none of them reach his stature. Not through lack of talent; they were simply lesser men. Much the same thing has happened in England, where Housman and Eliot, brilliant in so many ways, cannot match the sheer bulk and force of the great Victorians. And when all is said, were Verlaine's innovations really as extraordinary as his contemporaries thought? Most of them, examined with care, turn out to be rather trifling: he sometimes composed in lines of 5, 9, 11, 13, and even 17 syllables, instead of the more usual 8, 10, or 12. It was the impair he recommended in "Art poétique. . . . "

And in obedience to another precept of the same poem, he demanded greater freedom of rhyme, by which he meant the right to rhyme weakly or adequately instead of richly.

In some of his best work he follows these rules (if we can call them that): five of the nine pieces of Ariettes oubliées are written in impair, and the rhymes are often weak . . . , depending on vowel sounds alone with no supporting consonant. But his precepts lose something of their force when we discover that three of the other poems in the same section, including the most "Verlainian" of all ("Il pleure dans mon coeur") are not in impair and frequently have adequate rhymes. And this is true of most of his work: "Mon Rêve familier," "Chanson d'automne," "Mon Dieu m'a dit," all of Fêtes galantes except three ("Mandoline," "Colombine," "Ensourdine")—verse with less of heaviness and pose than anything else he produced. The claim that impair and weak rhyme can be used to blur the contours of sense and produce a vague and dreamy impression is one of those paradoxes a clever man invents and others believe. Unless a poem is already vague and dreamy, it is unlikely that any technique will make it so. "Art poétique," as Verlaine himself admitted, was a song; he never intended it to be taken too seriously.

He also liked to override the traditional caesura when he wrote alexandrines. Sometimes it is displaced, falling elsewhere than at the sixth syllable; more rarely deliberately bridged by a single word (enjambement sur la césure) as in "Et la tigresse épouvantable d'Hyrcanie" of Fêtes galantes. But reverence for the caesura was never an absolute, even in classical days. There may not be an example of enjambement sur la césure in Racine, but his tragedies contain numerous lines where the essential pause occurs elsewhere than at the sixth syllable. And for that matter, Victor Hugo had claimed credit for this particular "reform" long before Verlaine wrote ("Réponse à un acte d'accusation"). More important was Verlaine's use of rejet or "overflow" at the end of his lines. He was perhaps the first French poet to use this trick with entire success, and it enabled him to obtain effects of great beauty. . . .

Verlaine practised it with a skill so perfect that one suspects it must have corresponded to a fundamental need of heart and ear. And his more experimental work (Fêtes galantes, Romances sans paroles) does not contain the most striking examples. They are found in Sagesse where they fit the context admirably well, creating a tone of ecstatic adoration, particularly in the "Mon Dieu m'a dit" cycle. The ease and grace of such poems as "Clair de lune," "La Lune blanche," and "Mon Rêve familier," are, I think, more apparent than real. Because such poems express nothing in particular, tell no story, and are mere translations of mood and sensation, we suppose their technique to be as vague, hazy, and harmonious as the impression that technique creates. But on examination, they turn out to obey most of the regulations, such as alternate masculine and feminine rhymes, and lines of equal syllabification. For this reason alone they are triumphs of poetic art. French prosody is touchy and demanding; a poet who can obey all its rules and still give an impression of shimmering and evanescent reverie is a genius indeed.

There is little else to say of Verlaine as an innovator. When theory was in question he was much less daring, much more of a traditionalist, than his fiery young admirers supposed. . . .

Moréas concluded that he was an obstinate Parnassian, who had never progressed further than Baudelaire, with no influence on contemporary poetry, and the end of a line rather than a beginning; a man without ideas, theories, or a reasoned programme.

Coming from a second-rater like Moréas (second-rate by comparison with Verlaine), such criticism appears remarkably brash. But it has some truth. Verlaine's importance in literature, whether French or universal, arises from neither his technical experiments nor his influence on later writers. The experiments were means of self-expression, vehicles for his genius, but not the genius itself. And, unlike Baudelaire, he did not found a line of poets and his influence, when it existed, was almost invariably bad. . . .

There is no rhetoric in Verlaine, only a series of devices for avoiding it. Enjambement was one device, used particularly at the end of the lines. Rhetoric is for strong nerves, not for a sensibility preoccupied with the past, eternally alive to the suggestions of memory. Verlaine dwelt in recollections of his first years; the escapades of his life and the beauties of his verse were both manifestations of the same wish-neurosis, the same desire for a jouissance de néant meilleure que toute plénitude. Hence his style, hence the eternal parallels between life and art: they were mutually nostalgic and even hallucinogenic. And hence too (since reality and illusion are very different things), his constant failure to adjust to ordinary living and the catastrophes that attended all his sentimental adventures. . . .

His books were the direct and inevitable results of his temperament: artificial refuges, constructed according to the emotional habits he had contracted under the bell-glass of Elisa's [Moncomble, his cousin] affection. Each shows the persistence of memory in a man who never grew up, each is an attempt to adjust reality to the data memory supplies. All recreate in some form or other the never-forgotten paradise: ideal love (Poèmes saturniens); an eighteenth-century dreamworld (Fêtes galantes); harmonic suggestion (Romances sans paroles); union with God (Sagesse, Bonheur); life with Rimbaud or Létinois (Parallèlement, Amour); a flesh-padded universe of willing beauties (Chansons pour Elle, Chair, Femmes, Hombres). All the best poems spring from an involuntary nervous tremor, provoked by sensation; it cracks the glass of reality and the old obsession rises like a djin from a bottle. And always, behind the glimmering illusion, flows the chill wind of insecurity, the terror of time and death.

Verse of this kind, evolving from such capricious sources, inevitably has serious limitations, not the least of which is a disconcerting tendency to dry up, leaving the poet with no other resource than silence or uninspired labour. He is never free from the matrix of infancy, and even at its best, his work is often morbid and green-sick. At times he even distrusts his own genius: Verlaine sought to evade his more than once—as when he rushed into marriage, terrified by his passion for Lucien Viotti; or spent his year with Rimbaud lamenting the security he had lost; or again when, overtaken by disaster and locked in a cell, he alternated between exquisite inspiration ("Le ciel est pardessus le toit") and the copious mediocrity of the récits diaboliques. Paralysed by subconscious trauma, he was not only powerless to face the present, but, at times, even to take advantage of his own sublime gifts: they half-frightened him. He was torn between opposites; he wanted illusion and reality, spiritual adventure with Rimbaud (iconoclasm, liberty, "amours de tigre," the flaming blue eyes and the demi-god's body) and also the bourgeois comforts of home, complete with hot tea, a good fire, and a natty little woman. That is to say, he wanted them all until he got them. Then, like Emma Bovary, he wanted something else. There was no end to his powers of self-deception. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to attribute all this to the childhood fixation. But that was the initial flaw, the minute fissure in the dyke which, enlarged by other pressures, admitted a whole sea of anarchic passion. He was never happy with either side of his nature: Mathilde bored him; Rimbaud filled him with guilt and remorse. Neither reconciled dream and action. Neither could, since the dream was so distorted by illusion as to correspond to nothing factual. This memory obsession is one of Romanticism's most poisonous and seductive legacies. The tough, classical centuries—the seventeenth, the eighteenth—had no past; they lived three-dimensionally. A fourth dimension, time, has since been included. It is no passive addition, like a new room in a house, but rather tends to control and even corrupt the other three, as though it were less a room that a hypogeum of badly embalmed corpses, wafting their stench throughout the building. There is a good deal of this kind of smell in Verlaine, unmitigated by any intellectual ventilation. His art belongs to the general reinterpretation of aesthetic values which set in with the waning of scientific positivism. It gave us Impressionist painting, the music of Debussy, Fauré, and Duparc, the poetry of Mallarmé, and the prose of Marcel Proust, not to mention the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Both Proust and Bergson were sensationists; Proust, certainly, was as much fascinated by the past as Verlaine himself. All three used sensation to unchain memory and put it to work in a creative or divinatory way. In more senses than one, Verlaine's poetry is another "recherche du temps perdu," a further example of "matière et mémoire."

But there was an essential difference: Proust and Bergson were less interested in sensation as an end than as a means; they used it to reach a better understanding of illusion and reality. Their aims were objective; they were intent on plumbing the mysteries of consciousness, personality, and the creative process. There was no such purpose in Verlaine. The lack of it was one reason for his break with the Symbolists. They wanted a programme, and he had none. He lived instinctively. In his deepest work (Sagesse) the ideas were not his own but those supplied by the Athanasian Creed. He wandered into unknown country almost by accident, and made no attempt to chart it. He never turned on reality the penetrating gaze of a Baudelaire or the fiery glance of a Rimbaud. His nature was submissive and masochistic—"feminine," as he told [F. A.] Cazals.

He was Baudelaire's disciple; he borrowed some of his ideas and techniques, but only those which heighten sensation, like the theory of correspondances. The two men had no other point of contact. The dark world of despair and unrest which yawns throughout Les Fleurs du mal was not for Verlaine, nor the refusal to accept half-answers, nor the heroic cynicism of "Le Voyage." . . .

[Verlaine] had a prodigious lyric talent, and not many poets can rival him for sheer virtuosity, not even Baudelaire or Rimbaud. But it was the virtuosity of a child prodigy who never ceased being a child prodigy. The more we read him, the more we perceive that his achievements depended on this fundamental immaturity. His shiftlessness, his tantrums, his inability to resist seduction, and his raw sensitivity were all essential to his verse, even his religious verse. Raw sensitivity is a prerogative of childhood; no amount of sophistication could have given birth to the poignant sincerity of Sagesse or the alluring music of Romances sans paroles. .. . He wrote according to the dictates of a nervous erethism forever alert to the half-felt and the intangible: perfume, sound, colour, light and shade, remembered sexuality. Once involved with a subject demanding objectivity, he was beyond his depth and laboured in vain. As far as such a thing is possible, he was a poet of the echo—echoes of dead voices, silent music, joy realized through sadness.

It was a limited range; these are the qualities of frustration, with nothing epic or tragic about them. The past lay across his talent like a fallen column on a growth of acanthus:

Pour soulever un poids si lourd,
Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage . . .

And Verlaine was no Sisyphus. Even had he been, the obstruction was too massive; he would have spent his forces in sterile effort. There was no escape but the one he chose—illusion, the affreux soulagement of sex and alcohol, the quest for self-oblivion in the personalities of others. He was divided against himself, split into "parallels" by the cumbrous burden. And since parallels never meet, there could be no fusion, no supreme revelation like Les Fleurs du mal. A sadder fate than Baudelaire's, because so totally unheroic. Yet defeat under such conditions was not absolute. It even had elements of victory. The crushed plant was not dead: year after year it sent up its shoots and its leaves, mysterious and indestructible; and with what exquisite foliage it bordered and concealed the unyielding stone!