SOURCE: Porter, Laurence M. “The Crisis of French Symbolism.” In The Crisis of French Symbolism, pp. 1-26. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

The history of the nineteenth-century French lyric needs to be redefined. The very discredit into which diachronic approaches have fallen during the eras of Structuralism and Poststructuralism allows the assumptions that have informed these approaches to survive unchallenged in the collective preconscious of literary critics. We may consider literary history no longer worthy of consideration; we may divert our attention from it; but it will still survive subliminally, intact, and insulated from the salutary influence of competing ideas. Since we each have a personal history and pass through an organic life cycle, we shall always be compelled on some level to project the historical and organic metaphors onto other phenomena such as literature.

The prevailing scheme for structuring the history of nineteenth-century French poetry divides the century into three periods: Romanticism, an undifferentiated transitional phase, and Symbolism. Lacking the conceptual “home” of an identified literary movement, some major mid-century poets are neglected, while others are reft from their historical context so that they may be presented as precursors of Modernism rather than as representatives of their own times.

The French Romantics are perceived as revolutionary innovators. This perception has been shaped by the largely unexamined assumption that since literature reflects society, the French Revolution must have engendered radical transformations of literature. It touched off a quarter century of exhausting wars and internecine political strife that crippled developments in the arts. Overall, the first third of the nineteenth century was marked by the profoundly reactionary social movements of the Empire and the Restoration. During this time, literature reacted as well, retreating to a prerevolutionary Neoclassicism. We tend to overlook this fact in part because our perception of the French Romantics is unconsciously influenced by our awareness of the innovative poetic practice of the English writers Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake. Consequently, we assume that all Romantics of any stature must have transformed literature, and we dismiss Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Vigny as minor poets when on close examination they seem to have added little to the established traditions of verse. Even those critics who might hotly deny so disparaging an evaluation seldom take the time to write defenses of these poets. Lamartine appears a belated elegist (nobody considers the turbulent epic La Chute d'un ange) and Vigny a nostalgic advocate of the Neoclassic Stoic that went out of fashion after Napoleon I and David.

The poetry of Lamartine, Vigny, and the early Victor Hugo actually represents an unrecognized Neoclassicism. The eighteenth century, having lost the sense of the lyric, settled down to telling stories in rhymed verse. The early French “Romantics” innovated through reaction, returning to the genres of the Renaissance. From their viewpoint, what we today think of as Neoclassicism was coextensive with French art and French tradition since the early sixteenth century (the Baroque being a fascinating minor deviation). As John Porter Houston has observed, “For much of the nineteenth century in France, formal aesthetic questions continued frequently to be conceived according to basic assumptions of neoclassicism (imitation, unity of detail, symmetry).”¹

It has become a misleading commonplace to say that French Romanticism broke down conventional generic categories. True, the first third of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth in France of the historical novel (inspired by Sir Walter Scott), the “conte fantastique” (created by Charles Nodier and then given a great impetus by translations of E. T. A. Hoffmann), and the melodrama (Guilbert de Pixérécourt). The Rousseauistic (self-justifying) confession also blossomed into a genre. But the notion of a breakdown of genres does not explain what was happening in French lyric poetry up until at least 1830. In 1828, for example, Emile Deschamps's influential preface to his Etudes françaises et étrangères invoked the concept of genre rather than of a Romantic revolt against Classicism in order to explain the evolution of poetry in his day. Deschamps suggested that writers had surveyed existing genres and then chosen to devote themselves to those that had not already been overexploited: “The Lyric, Elegiac, and Epic being the weak areas in our former poetry … it is therefore in them that the energies of the poetry of today were destined to be focused. Therefore, Victor Hugo revealed his talents in the Ode, Lamartine in the Elegy, and Alfred de Vigny in the ‘Poëme.’”² The generic subtitles the early French Romantics frequently employed indicate that they themselves thought of their lyric poems in terms of traditional genres. In sum, they conceived of their achievements in the lyric as a culmination of Neoclassicism, and they saw themselves as rejuvenating traditional forms with new ideas just as André Chénier before them had claimed to do. (One thinks of the quintessentially Romantic painter Delacroix's indignant rejection of that label when he protested: “Je suis un pur classique.”) They achieved novelty through a crystallization of generic self-consciousness; they revived the lyric genres by recentering them on metaphors that summed up the essence of each. Lamartine used the metaphor of the echo to subsume the traditional elegiac pattern of appeal and response; Vigny condensed the manifold heroic actions of the epic into a sculptural shorthand of assertive and submissive bodily attitudes and gestures, thus moving the short narrative poem toward the lyric; and Hugo telescoped the spatial sublime of the ode into the “metaphor maxima” (the juxtaposition of two nouns such as “monde châtiment” or “l'Hydre univers”) to form a kernel of revelation replacing the optimistic but rhetorical, verbose, and thus diluted prophecies of the eighteenth-century visionary ode. These revivals formed a literary parallel to the political developments of the time, specifically the Restoration.³

The codes (systems of widely understood and generally accepted references and meanings) of the elegy, short narrative poem, and ode, moreover, presume social solidarity. The elegiac poet has been isolated by loss and grief, but not by estrangement from society: he appeals for sympathy from others, who unquestionably share his values. The short narrative relates a socially significant event from the perspective of a shared heritage of history and tradition. Vigny deplores war, the injustice of the Old Testament God, the decline of the aristocracy, and society's lack of appreciation for poets, but he adopts the stance of a would-be reformer (or reactionary) working within the system. The encomiastic quality of the ode also presumes a community of values. The choice of such a genre takes for granted the facility of inspiration, the formality and elegance of diction, reference, and subject, and an attentive reception by a public in harmony with the poet and his or her values. Surveying the history of French poetry during the first two-thirds of the century, Théodore de Banville claimed that the ode had come to dominate the mainstream of French poetry.⁴

According to the consecrated, unexamined categories of traditional literary history, French poets of the middle third of the century fall into the chronological cracks between Romanticism and Symbolism. Like all awkward exceptions to a general scheme, they are accommodated by special labels—Théophile Gautier and Banville by “L'Art pour l'Art”; Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle and José María de Heredia by “Parnasse”—which reduce them to oddities and remove them from serious consideration. Baudelaire fits in uneasily as a transitional figure between Romanticism and Symbolism. Others, including Tristan Corbière, Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and le comte de Lautréamont (and on these poets much good work has been done) have been considered interesting mainly as harbingers of the twentieth-century ironic tradition, of Surrealism, or of Modernism.

In fact, poets such as Corbière, Lautréamont, and Laforgue were the true Romantics: only around mid-century did a real revolutionary departure from conventional genres, diction, and theme occur. Hugo waited until 1854 to claim “j'ai mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire” (I have set a [revolutionary's] red cap on the old dictionary). In the work of these poets, as well as in that of Leconte de Lisle and Maxime Du Camp (Chants modernes, 1855), the code and context of traditional lyrics are affected.⁵ Romanticism proper retains the familiar poetic vehicles but changes their message, dramatizing a poet standing apart from society. Such a condition of literature is illustrated perfectly by Lautréamont's Poésies, which take an old form—the aphorism modeled after Pascal and Vauvenargues—and reverse its conventional wisdom.

The simplest of the familiar and therefore readily available ways of reshaping and subverting traditional themes was to shift from the tone of encomium to that of satire. To the dominant discourse declaring that whatever is, is right, the Romantics retorted with a counterdiscourse or oppositional narrative.⁶ This truculent mode of expression extended eventually to their vocabulary as well as their themes and led to the interjection of familiar and coarse locutions into what had traditionally been a solemn situation. Hugo claims to transform language, but the real changes in diction come with Corbière and Laforgue. The most obvious symptoms of this upheaval were the appearance of a major new genre, the prose poem; the reemergence of satire; and the de-euphemization of metaphor, which reversed the previous tendency of this master trope of the lyric to make the unpleasant pleasant.⁷

Lautréamont—in fact rather timidly—transforms the encounter between poet and reader from a didactic to a sexual one that claims to be neither useful nor pleasant. Even when the Romantic poet withdraws, however, even when society does not heed him or her, the poet's reaction is to forge better weapons and then reenter the fray, denouncing indifference, mediocrity, and complacency. (The Flaubert of Bouvard et Pécuchet is still very much a Romantic.) Even a mutually aggressive, negative relationship remains a relationship. A bad object seems better than none. Wrestling with his loathsome God, Lautréamont still enjoys intimacy. In opposing convention, Romantic literature remains bound to it, engaged in an unending dialogue with accepted values and continually revitalizing them—like Hercules' hydra—through the very act of contestation.

In the Romantic system, then, values have become problematical, but the act of communication still has not. As Houston has explained, pre-Symbolist poetry in general is characterized by

great clarity in rhetorical situations, by which I mean the relationships among author, speaker, person or thing addressed, subject matter, and reader, or whatever combination of them is relevant. This clarity is demonstrable on the levels of syntax, vocabulary, and figurative language. … A noteworthy stylistic aspect of romantic lyric is the reader's ability to distinguish between concrete and figurative language or to recognize the simultaneous presence of both … we can perceive the poem's reference as general, exemplary, or particular.⁸

The actual transition from Romanticism to Symbolism was provoked by the problems raised by Romanticism's Neoplatonic worldview, which assumed that there were identifiable transcendent referents for language.

In practice, Symbolism is ordinarily defined either too narrowly or too broadly: as a general tendency of La Belle Epoque (1880-1914) or as the systematic, pervasive use of a restricted vocabulary of symbols in poetry. Standard definitions of Symbolism in dictionaries and encyclopedias tend merely to list some of the writers—and sometimes the painters and musicians—of the latter years of the nineteenth century, without defining what they may have had in common, as though the movement lacked definitive or even characteristic traits. It is therefore not surprising that literary historians have not agreed on who the Symbolists were. Attempts to identify and categorize them seem to follow at least four major tendencies. The first claims that Baudelaire was a precursor and that after him Symbolism divided into two “branches,” the musical and the metaphoric, dominated respectively by Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé.⁹ A second view discerns two different branches: the free-form, alogical creations of Rimbaud and the intellectual, stringently formalistic verse of Mallarmé, an opposition echoed in the twentieth century by Paul Valéry (“a poem should be a festival of the intellect”) and André Breton (“a collapse of the intellect”).¹⁰ A third view would also include Corbière and Laforgue as Symbolists, presumably in order to give two fine neglected poets their due by sheltering them under the umbrella of an overarching movement in literary history.¹¹ A fourth perspective extends the Symbolist period to the mid-1920s and embraces such twentieth-century figures as Paul Claudel, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Valéry.¹² Only Mallarmé appears on everyone's list; Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Valéry are each omitted by some formulation. And those critics who try to characterize the poetic practice of the Symbolist authors, in addition to merely enumerating them, almost inevitably divide these authors into two opposing groups.

One wonders, then, what if anything the representatives of those contrasting persuasions share. Musicality? Only Verlaine really demonstrates this characteristic, and indeed the last famous French poet able to produce verse consistently appropriate for a musical setting was Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377). The late-nineteenth-century composers Claude Debussy, Henri Du Parc, and Gabriel Fauré, through the magisterial achievement of their art songs, were mainly responsible after the fact for giving Symbolist poets the reputation of being musicians. Mallarmé's “Un coup de Dés” adopts a system of notation analogous to that of the musical score insofar as the spatial disposition of the words on the page suggests an attribute comparable to pitch and the type size suggests an attribute comparable to intensity (loudness). But this is an isolated experiment, and to call it musical is to confuse graphic notation, a feature of both poetry and music, with the arrangement of sounds in relation to one another at a given moment and also over time, a feature of music alone. Synesthesia? This quality is prominent only in Baudelaire and in his non-Symbolist master Théophile Gautier. Symbols? The essence of the symbolism of all periods as we have traditionally understood it is that its metaphors are organized into a system. But surely one finds a greater density of symbols in William Blake, John Donne, and Maurice Scève than in Rimbaud or Verlaine. Baudelaire uses allegory and simile more often than metaphor, although it is on his symbolism that I focus later. … And Rimbaud's poetry is more striking in its effects of disjunction than of coherence. Only Mallarmé deploys a limited and tightly organized vocabulary of metaphors as the main materials for his poetry. Must we then limit French Symbolism to Mallarmé?

The view I am advocating would replace the traditional division of the nineteenth-century French lyric into the phases of Romanticism/transitions/Symbolism with a division into Neoclassicism/Romanticism/Symbolism. One could schematize it as follows:

Mode	Neoclassicism	Romanticism	Symbolism
Vehicles	Conventional	Conventional	Original
Codes	Conventional	Original	Original
Metalanguage	Affirmative	Questioning	Negating

In epistemological terms, the Romantics assailed the absurdity and errors of existing institutions, seeking to reform them or replace them with others. The Symbolists saw all institutions as relative to time and place and circumstance and therefore as delusional. The rationale for the Symbolists' departure from tradition was most clearly expressed by Schopenhauer in Book III of The World as Will and Idea, where he summed up a current of thought widespread in the nineteenth century:

Time, space, and causality are that arrangement of our intellect by virtue of which the one being of each kind which alone really is, manifests itself to us as a multiplicity of similar beings, constantly appearing and disappearing in endless succession. The apprehension of things by means of and in accordance with this arrangement is immanent knowledge; that, on the other hand, which is conscious of the true state of the case, is transcendental knowledge. The latter is obtained in abstracto through the criticism of pure reason, but in exceptional cases it may also appear intuitively.¹³

Vigny had anticipated this contrast of two forms of knowledge in his ironically titled “Les Oracles,” referring to ambitious men who scatter their thoughts to the winds of political debate instead of trying to crystallize, in solitude, the diamond of pure poetry. So the poet's mission is to see beyond the flux of appearances in order to apprehend the essential. Baudelaire articulated these aspirations clearly in his article on Hugo in 1861: “tout est hiéroglyphique. … Or, qu'est-ce que le poète (je prends le mot dans son acception la plus large), si ce n'est un traducteur, un déchiffreur?” (Everything is a hieroglyph. … Now, what is a poet [I am taking the word in its broadest possible meaning] if not a translator, a decipherer?).¹⁴ Through the imagination Baudelaire tried to apprehend universal analogy, “ou ce qu'une religion mystique appelle la correspondance.”¹⁵ Elsewhere he defined the experience of revelation in quasi-Schopenhauerian terms: “Dans certains états de l'âme presque surnaturels, la profondeur de la vie se révèle tout entière dans le spectacle, si ordinaire qu'il soit, qu'on a sous les yeux. Il en devient le Symbole” (In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the depths of existence are entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, you have before your eyes. It becomes the Symbol [of those depths]).¹⁶

Seeking transcendence, the Symbolists abandoned both Neoclassic tradition and Romantic opposition, but as poets they remained tied to the use of language, a system of conventions which prima facie seemed hardly susceptible of attaining or even becoming the vehicle for a vision of transcendence. To evade this aporia, they adopted one of three main solutions. Two had already been tried by the Romantics and by earlier poets as well.

The first solution, the age-old doctrine of Cratylism, postulated that language in and of itself, as a divine creation, bears an ultimate signification. Its shape and sound constitute the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible transcendence. In addition to graphemes, etymology, homonymy, and onomatopoeia supposedly hold clues to primordial meanings. This tradition runs through Rousseau to Nodier and of course Mallarmé, whose speculations on the expressive forms of letters and typography are well known.¹⁷ The rapid development of historical linguistics in the nineteenth century, as it traced Western languages back to an Indo-European root, encouraged belief in Cratylism. Some poets believed that one could “purify” language by using it so that it more closely reflected its origins. Mallarmé had urged: “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” (Give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe). In his “Suite à une réponse à un acte d'accusation,” Hugo for one had earlier expounded an almost mystical concept of language; in passages dated from 1830 to 1864 and collected in the Postscriptum de ma vie he repeatedly emphasizes the necessity of fusing form and matter—a notion echoed by Banville in his Petit Traité de poésie française of 1872.¹⁸ Hugo, however, finally confronted the unbridgeable gap between language and the transcendent in the last ten pages of his unfinished visionary poem “Dieu,” one still too little known. After presenting ten successive and ever more refined depictions of God by winged beings whom the poet encounters during an imagined ascension toward Heaven—a progress that metaphorically asserts his claim of being in contact with a realm of higher knowledge—the poet capitulates:¹⁹

Le mot noir est un grain de cendre dans la brume,
O gouffre, et le mot blanc est un flocon d'écume,
L'infini ne sait point ce qu'on murmure en bas;
.....Pourquoi chercher les mots où ne sont plus les choses?
Le vil langage humain n'a pas d'apothéoses.

(The black word is a speck of ash in the fog, / O abyss, and the white word is a trace of foam, / The infinite is unaware of what is murmured below; / Why seek words where there are no things? / Vile human language has no apotheoses.)²⁰

For ten more pages the conclusion of the poem expatiates on the inadequacy of language, and the last word is an angelic command to the poet: “Silence!” Hugo complied by not completing the last two of the projected ten sections of the poem.

If a direct attack on the transcendent by means of words seemed bound to fail, there remained the hope that the beyond could be intuited, suggested, indirectly evoked. So Baudelaire referred to poetry as a “magie suggestive,” and Banville called poetry “this sorcery by means of which ideas are infallibly communicated to us in a certain way by words which do not express them.”²¹ And Mallarmé of course declared, “Nommer un object, c'est supprimer les trois-quarts de la jouissance du poëme qui est faite de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C'est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le symbole” (To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which consists in guessing little by little: to suggest it, that is my dream. The symbol is constituted by the flawless practice of this mystery/ministry).²² In practice, such an enterprise must steer a treacherous course between the Scylla of obscurity and the Charybdis of preciosity based upon periphrasis and allusion. In the latter instance the flash of insight achieved in guessing the answer to a riddle may masquerade as a window on transcendence.

After abandoning the prophetic statements of frankly visionary literature or the alternative of suggestion, the poet is reduced to a third possibility: to despair of the success of the communicative process altogether, since only the transcendent is worth communicating and since the poet's verbal vehicle must be the antithesis of transcendence. Such despair is what characterizes Symbolism proper—or more precisely, the first or crisis period of Symbolism as opposed to the optimistic “second Symbolism” of the mid-1880s on—as distinguished from Romanticism. Romanticism preserved a robust optimism about its ability to apprehend an ultimate truth and to communicate it, be it only eventually and to only a happy few. Although Hugo abandoned his attempt to depict God verbally, he persisted till the end of his life—for another quarter century—in his attempts to describe the reverberations of Providence in human history. In advance, he scheduled his posthumous publications at five-year intervals so as to ensure the greatest possible impact for his revelations. But all the major Symbolist poets in France underwent a crisis of loss of faith in the communicative process. They experienced what the French call “l'incommunicabilité”—the difficulty or impossibility of mutual understanding. (Before, during, and after the apogee of Symbolism, of course, this motif is commonplace in larval form as the quiproquo of comic theater; it receives thematic development in plays such as Alfred de Musset's Fantasio and in the theater of the absurd.) Eléonore Zimmermann and Claude Cuénot come to mind as two critics with a keen sense of this unifying principle in French Symbolism. Cuénot, for example, has said that “Verlaine is modern in his effort to express the inexpressible, and in that respect he is indeed a disciple of Baudelaire and a kindred spirit to Rimbaud and Mallarmé. … The magnificent generation of poets that followed Baudelaire owes its greatness to this almost despairing attempt.”²³

Mallarmé, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud all encounter hindrances to communication at all points along the axis running from sender to receiver: inspiration is elusive, the words available for embodying a transcendent poetic vision are conventions, and the potential audience remains indifferent or alien. Symbolist poetry is a poetry of failure. But each poet chooses to dramatize only one particular problem as insoluble, while merely stating or implying solutions to the others.

Thus the relationship with a Muse—a dramatized figuration of inspiration—is problematic in the verse poems of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, who depict their respective lyric personae as being afflicted, dominated, or disgusted by the (often supernatural) female Other. But Mallarmé's personae can achieve no relationship at all with this figure, who flees and eludes them. Given the problem that only the conventional tokens of human language are available to convey the unique and transcendent poetic vision, Mallarmé, as we have seen, resorts to Cratylism, finding in the shape of letters and in the sound and etymology of words innate meanings deeper than the conventional signifieds. Baudelaire denounces the vacuity of words (“tel est du globe entier l'éternel bulletin” [such is the tedious news bulletin of the entire planet]) as a reflection of our spiritual emptiness without God.²⁴ Rimbaud violently distorts conventional prosody and tortures the lexicon with glaring neologisms. But only Verlaine literally erases all human discourse by inserting into his lines words denoting musical tones and nonhuman noises that appear to function autonomously and not merely as an element of a description, as does the howling city street in Baudelaire. And while other poets may have trouble reaching their audiences or may at times be reduced to talking to themselves, only Baudelaire must seemingly forfeit all self-expression in his messages in order to attract the attention of an audience, by bribing potential hearers with a narcissistic image of themselves. Finally only Rimbaud—in the early verse—imagines an audience that is attentive but so hostile and overwhelming that he must assassinate it or flee it, or both.

So each French Symbolist impresses a distinctive, personal stamp upon the common theme that the unreliability of language and communication makes it difficult to be a poet even when one does not have to endure alienation from an unappreciative society. And the poetic dark night of the soul eventuated differently for each of them. Mallarmé ultimately regained faith in the existence of an absolute signification that could be verbally conveyed to a public: most of his surviving notes for the totalizing “Livre” (the poetical parts must have been burned after his death by his daughter, at his request) involved counting the house of the potential future audiences for public readings. Verlaine relapsed into a dilutely confessional neo-Romanticism with his collections of anecdotes about “My Hospitals” and “My Prisons.” Baudelaire turned to writing self-critical prose poems that brilliantly disparaged his past hopes. And Rimbaud, of course, abandoned poetry: the most authentic and consequently, for those of us who cherish the chimera of lyricism, the most dismaying solution to the communicative crisis.

Notes

1. John Porter Houston, French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement: A Study of Poetic Structures (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 2. For an authoritative overview of the entire Symbolist phenomenon, with discussions of its aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings, see The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages, ed. Anna Balakian (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiado, 1982), pts. I-II, pp. 15-123.

2. Emile Deschamps, Etudes françaises et étrangères (Paris: A. Levavasseur, 1828), pp. 12-13.

3. See Laurence M. Porter, The Renaissance of the Lyric in French Romanticism: Elegy, “Poëme,” and Ode (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1978), pp. 11-14.

4. Théodore de Banville, Petit Traité de poésie française (Paris: Charpentier, 1891 [1872]), p. 158: “L'ode, je le répète une dernière fois, a absorbé tous les genres poétiques … elle est devenue toute la poésie moderne.”

5. For a discussion of the terms “code” and “context” as used in linguistics, see Roman Jakobson's influential Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 41-48, 54-55, 61, and 67-73; his “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 3 vols., III, 18-27; and the famous “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960), pp. 350-77.

6. See Richard Terdiman, Discourse and Counterdiscourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Ross Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition: Les Débuts du modernisme en France (Paris: Corti, 1987).

7. On this last point see Laurence M. Porter, “Modernist Maldoror: The Deeuphemization of Metaphor,” L'Esprit Créateur, 18 (Winter 1978), 25-34.

8. Houston, French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement, pp. 7-8.

9. See Thomas A. Kovach, “A New Kind of Poetry: Hofmannsthal and the French Symbolists,” Comparative Literature, 37 (Winter 1985), 50n, 51; and The Oxford Companion to French Literature, ed. Joyce M. H. Reid (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), s.v. “Symbolism,” pp. 603-4.

10. See Hugo Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry, from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 109.

11. See Houston, French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement, pp. 59-83 and passim.

12. See James R. Lawler, The Language of French Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. vii-ix and passim.

13. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), I, 224.

14. Charles Baudelaire, “Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains: Victor Hugo,” in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Yves Le Dantec and Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76), II, 129-41 (p. 133); hereafter cited in text and notes as OC.

15. Baudelaire to Alphonse Toussenel, January 21, 1856, in his Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), I, 336.

16. Baudelaire, Fusées XI (frag. 17), OC I, 659. This passage and the two previous quotations from Baudelaire are all cited by Henri Peyre, Qu'est-ce que le Symbolisme? (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974), pp. 44-46.

17. See Gérard Genette, Mimologiques: Voyages en Cratylie (Paris: Seuil, 1976), especially the chapters on Nodier and Mallarmé.

18. Banville, Petit Traité, pp. 262-63; see also Margaret Gilman, The Idea of Poetry in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 233.

19. See Porter, Renaissance of the Lyric, pp. 100-106.

20. Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles; La Fin de Satan; Dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 1066, 1104.

21. Banville, Petit Traité, p. 291, cited in Gilman, Idea of Poetry in France, p. 236.

22. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Réponses à des enquêtes sur l'évolution littéraire,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), p. 869.

23. Claude Cuénot, “Situation de Paul Verlaine,” L'Information littéraire, 9 (May-June 1957), 106-10 (p. 109); and Eléonore M. Zimmermann, “Mallarmé and Rimbaud in Crisis,” in Mary Ann Caws, ed., Writing in a Modern Temper: Essays on French Literature and Thought in Honor of Henri Peyre, Stanford French and Italian Studies, vol. 23 (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1984), pp. 102-16.

24. For detailed comments on the influence of the great seventeenth-century French preachers (Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon) on Baudelaire's poetry, see Jean Starobinski, “Les Rimes du vide,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, 11 (1975), 133-44. This influence is obvious elsewhere, for instance in Les Paradis artificiels, although it has never received adequate critical attention.