Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term “Art,” I should call it “the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.”

Poe, “The Veil of the Soul”

In its strictest historical sense, symbolism describes the French and Belgian writers of the late nineteenth century who, rejecting realism, tried to suggest ideas, emotions and attitudes by using symbolic words, figures and objects. Around 1885 to 1895, they produced manifestoes, sponsored literary reviews, met in various literary groups and discussed points of artistic doctrine. But as several notable critics have shown, symbolism has a much broader aesthetic and historical base and may include works dating from 1857 (when Baudelaire's revolutionary book of poems, The Flowers of Evil, appeared) to the 1930s.¹ Among the symbolist writers, one could then number the four greatest French poets of the second half of the nineteenth century—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé (sometimes called pre-symbolists or precursors of symbolism); the lesser-known poets and theoreticians (e.g. Henri de Régnier, Gustave Kahn, René Ghil, Jean Moréas, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Charles Morice, Emile Verhaeren); and several of the finest writers of the first third of the twentieth century: Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens (sometimes called post-symbolists or heirs of symbolism). Symbolism would then imply a general trend, and a special attention to language.

In its largest and most interesting aesthetic sense, symbolism implies at once a rebellion and a re-creation. It is a revolt against the kind of realism that is but the description of things, feelings and people. For the symbolists do not wish merely to describe; instead, they aim to re-create through their words a state of being, a feeling, a glimmer, a vision. They want the reader to sense, and to react to, the experience itself. Seen this way, symbolism is above all an attempt to transmit by means of symbols—frequently by means of a poetic language that the poet must invent—the mysteries that palpitate beneath appearances. A symbol is something that stands for or represents something else. It calls attention to itself while also suggesting far more than it is itself. The “meaning hidden behind the appearance is not necessarily one: the symbol is not a riddle. … There is therefore, in the symbol, polyvalence: a multiplicity of meanings,” writes Henri Peyre.²

And so symbolism uses a veil, and seeks to pierce a veil. It uses a veil of words to convey emotions, perceptions and visions. And it seeks to pierce the veil of nature, of sensation and of truth: of truth that is the experience of a moment, and of truth that is eternal. In its most elevated reaches, symbolism is a quasi-religious quest that seeks to capture and to convey the ephemeral, the mysterious and the transcendent. “Every thing sacred and that wishes to remain sacred envelops itself in mystery,” writes Mallarmé, whose pronouncements on poetry are invaluable to an understanding of what symbolism means in its most arcane and exalted aspects.³

Mystery, therefore, is paramount: mystery not merely described or interpreted or explained, but mystery reenacted, by means of the word. Mystery implies secrecy, obscurity and the quality of being inexplicable. Mystery also evokes a religious experience, suggesting by its etymology a supernatural thing, a secret rite or a divine secret. In fact, poetry for some of the symbolists is at times an almost divine utterance during which the poet appears a kind of god or a medium for a god. Through the mystery of the word, which may evoke the Word—the Logos, the poet seeks to commune with and to reveal the invisible, the infinite or the unknown. In “The Beacons,” for example, Baudelaire portrays art as a reaching out toward the infinite; and at the end of “The Voyage,” the poet exclaims that he wishes “to plunge … / … Into / The depths of the Unknown to find something new!” Rimbaud, who followed Baudelaire and who went farther than Baudelaire, proclaims that the poet “arrives at the unknown!” (Letter of May 15, 1871 to Paul Demeny). These poets' reachings out for the infinite, the invisible, or the unknown are certainly not traditional religious experiences. Nevertheless, their strivings and their exaltations carry overtones of the religious and of the prophetic: the ecstasy of experiencing, and of transmitting through words, the mystery.

In many ways, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé seek to create, by means of their art, a religion of poetry. Verlaine, on the other hand, creates at times, as in some of his poems in Sagesse (Wisdom) (e.g. “My God said to me …”), a poetry of religion. But in his own way Verlaine, too, seeks to capture and to convey his experience of the mystery. For his lyric transpositions are glimmerings of what is most fragile and most mysterious—mysterious in all senses of the word—in life: emotions, moods, memories, and moments.

Along with mystery, the secret and sacred value of the word, several other traits are more or less characteristic of the writers one may call symbolist, and particularly of the four poets upon whom we shall concentrate. Their poetry is above all suggestive. “I think that … there must only be allusion,” Mallarmé told Jules Huret in an interview. “To name an object … is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem … to suggest it, there's the dream. The perfect use of this mystery constitutes the symbol: to evoke little by little a mood, or, inversely, to choose an object and to disengage from it a mood, through a series of decipherings” (Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, p. 869).

Their sensitivity is acute. Frequently they plunge into sensations, memories and dreams. So deeply do they delve into themselves that at times they become isolated and hermetic as they re-create their inner, private worlds. Their poetry then extends and develops the Romantic image of the poet isolated from the uncomprehending and hostile crowd: Baudelaire's “The Albatross” and Mallarmé's “Edgar Poe's Tomb” explore such figures. Mallarmé's poetic language and at times Rimbaud's (e.g. in “Memory” and other poems he wrote during the spring and summer of 1872—poems included in this book under the heading of “Last Poems Written in Verse”—and throughout much of A Season in Hell and The Illuminations), draw their richnesses from the secrets of the poets' psyches that perhaps they could explain, but certainly will not. Instead, the artists wish to remain obscure, seemingly aloof, isolated, disdainful. It is up to the reader to pierce the veil, to approach the mystery. The lonely towers in Yeats's poems are emblematic of such involuntary—and voluntary—isolation and alienation from the world.

Often in symbolist poetry there is music: music evoked to capture the poet's mood and to epitomize his emotions (as in Baudelaire's “Music”), or music re-created in sounds that filter through the lines. “Music before anything else …,” Verlaine advises in his “Art of Poetry.” In fact, Verlaine's book Romances sans paroles ([Sentimental] Songs without Words) takes its title from music and implies that the poet's words are superfluous or that they are the music itself. There are also Rimbaud's beautiful rhythms and rhymes in lyrics like “The Crows” and “Shame”⁴ and in the “songs” (like Verlaine, Rimbaud uses the word “romances”) he mentions in “Deliriums II” of A Season in Hell: songs like “Eternity,” which appears in an earlier version in this book. For Mallarmé, poetry in its purest, most ideal form is music, created by words: “Poetry, approaching the Idea, is Music, par excellence” (“Variations sur un sujet: Le Livre, instrument spirituel” [“Variations on a Theme: The Book, Spiritual Instrument”], p. 381). His lyrical and finely sensual “A Faun's Afternoon” inspired Debussy to compose in 1894 his melodious and exuberantly sensual Prelude to A Faun's Afternoon. In fact, Mallarmé said that his method of poetical notation (“this naked use of thought”) in “Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard” (“A Cast of the Die Will Never Abolish Chance”) would create, in that poem partaking of free verse and of the prose poem, the effect of a “musical score” (p. 455).

For these four French symbolists, poetry becomes the search for, and the shaping of, a new poetic language. In order to transmit feelings, sensations and tremors, intimations of the invisible, glimmerings of truth and explosive visions; in order to re-create the vast panoply of emotions ranging from melodious languor to suicidal depression, from ethereal exaltation to volcanic joy, each poet forges his own special language: a language clothed in mystery, to reveal the mystery.

Each writer, therefore, introduces innovations, some more daring than others. Baudelaire, the earliest and perhaps the least innovative in terms of poetic diction, breaks away at times from the traditional French alexandrine (the line of 12 syllables) and from lines with an even number of syllables to use instead the vers impair, the line with an uneven number of syllables that Verlaine would later find so attractive, so appropriate to his unsettled, and unsettling, psyche. (“Prefer the Uneven-Syllabled Line,” he would advise in his “Art of Poetry.”) Baudelaire uses the vers impair, for example, in one of his most beautiful and lyrically unnerving love poems, “Invitation to the Voyage.” He also introduces some linguistic innovations. For example, he uses anatomical and pathological vocabulary, in order to shock the reader, of course, but also and above all in order to depict fully, in all its grotesqueness and its beauty, the human condition.⁵ Also, he infuses sensuous and sensual eroticism into great lyrical poetry. Not that French literature had been lacking in eroticism until Baudelaire's day, but in Baudelaire's poetry sensuality is at once lyrical, sensuous, erotic and spiritual (and not merely lewd, or crude or ribald). Baudelaire also uses synaesthesia, the evoking of one sense impression by means of another, to produce some of his most revolutionary, most powerful and most transcendent effects. For example, touch and smell call forth taste, sight and sound—all the body, mind and soul, therefore—in “Exotic Perfume,” where the poet, who inhales “the scent” of his mistress's warm breast, sees and feels a vision unfolding that includes dazzling sights, “savory fruits” and the perfumed scents of exotic trees that mingle in his “soul with the bargemen's melodies.”

Following Baudelaire's lead in linguistic and rhythmic innovations, Rimbaud begins his poetic career with daring uses of blasphemy and scatology (e.g. “Evening Prayer”), and with stark, often grotesque evocations of human physiology or bodily excretions (e.g. “The Seated Ones,” “The Plundered Heart” and the lines in “The Drunken Boat” about “vomit,” birds' “droppings,” and “mucus”). Both Baudelaire and Rimbaud, in fact, create an aesthetics of ugliness—partly through a predilection for perversity and perversion, a turning away from what is conventionally accepted (from the Latin per, an intensive, + vertere, to turn); partly through a desire to scandalize; and partly through their perceiving beauty in what is traditionally regarded as repulsive. For example, in “To the Reader,” the prefatory poem to The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire says: “In repugnant objects we find alluring charms.” And as a fat and foul-smelling woman rises from an old bathtub in Rimbaud's sonnet “Venus Anadyomene,” her “broad rump” is “hideously / Beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.” While the title and the first thirteen lines clearly deride the classical conception of beauty, Venus rising from the sea, the words “hideously / Beautiful” reveal that for Rimbaud there is something sensuously and intellectually pleasurable in what others consider repulsive.

In his use of rhythmic innovations, Rimbaud goes much farther than Baudelaire, for he frees himself so completely from the constraints of French versification (he begins to break away in some of his poems of the spring and summer of 1872) that he writes two of the first free verse poems in French (“Marine” [“Seascape”] and “Mouvement” [“Movement”], which were eventually published in the Illuminations). More, he invents in the Illuminations a prose poem truly his own: a poem-illumination that is a synaesthetic explosion of sound, color, emotion and perpetual movement. Baudelaire, too, had created an original type of prose poem in his book published posthumously in 1869, Petits Poèmes en prose: Le Spleen de Paris (Little Prose Poems: Paris Spleen). But Baudelaire's prose poem, more discursive than Rimbaud's, is closer to lyric prose: a musical meditation that caresses, unnerves, and thrills. Rimbaud's poem-illumination, like a flash of lightning, is fiery and concentrated: a vision that bursts into being during a moment of almost divine revelation and is gone the next, remaining only—but remaining searingly, for one does not forget such explosions—in the memory and in the awakened senses. An illumination that dazzles, before the inevitable darkness.

Verlaine's poetry is on another plane, but it too scintillates with intimations of immortality, and mortality. His language is less daring than Rimbaud's; his innovations are far more timid. But while Verlaine never abandons rhyme, at times he stretches rhyme to its farthest limits by rhyming on an unstressed syllable, as in “Autumn Song,” where he uses the article “la” as a rhyme word: “Et je m'en vais / Au vent mauvais / Qui m'emporte / Deça, delà, / Pareil à la / Feuille morte.” (My translation attempts to capture that unexpectedness: “And I go off in / The evil wind / That carries me ahead / To this area / And that, like the / Leaf that is dead.”) Or in “Moonlight,” Verlaine's rhyming on the unstressed adjective “quasi” creates an unexpected rhyme that highlights the importance of this word which questions the very nature of his description. The maskers and bergamasche, he says, are “quasi / Sad Beneath their fantastical disguises.” Thus, while rhyme is present for the eye in these cases, it is not there naturally for the ear unaccustomed to hearing an unstressed syllable as a rhyme word.

Verlaine is also somewhat innovative in terms of rhythm (he prefers the vers impair, as we have noted) and in vocabulary. Upon occasion he introduces colloquial, even popular, expressions into his poetry, phrases that he then juxtaposes with images that are extremely lyrical or delicate. For example, in the fourth stanza of “Brussels: Merry-Go-Round,” a poem in which he immerses himself in dizzying sounds and movements, he says, using rather colloquial language: “It's entrancing how drunk it makes you to go / Like this in this silly carrousel: / Well-being in the belly and in the head, aching, so / Much aching and heaps of feeling well.” But in the seventh, which is the final stanza, his language is highly poetic: “Go round, go round! the sky in velvet comes / To dress itself with golden stars.” In “Kaleidoscope” he combines the colloquial and vulgar with the lyrical. In the sixth stanza he evokes prostitution, disease (“scurf”) and “the scents of urine,” as well as the sound of firecrackers, which in French may suggest passing gas (the French word for firecracker is le pétard). But the last stanza is delicate, sensuously lyrical and refined in vocabulary: “It will be like when one dreams and one wakes from sleep! / And one falls asleep again and one dreams once more / Of the same enchantment and the same décor, / In the summer's grass, to the moiré noise of the flight of a bee.”

Like Rimbaud, Mallarmé was a daring and inimitable inventor of a poetic language. In “Edgar Poe's Tomb,” his sonnet eulogizing and epitomizing his vision of the American poet, Mallarmé writes that Poe's goal was to “give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe.” This is Mallarmé's goal, as well. To achieve his ends, Mallarmé takes words away from their ordinary usage in order to set them apart and to purify them. He dislocates syntax, places words in an unconventional, yet profoundly meaningful and above all suggestive order. He uses common words in uncommon ways, or he selects strange and uncommon words. He wrote to a friend on May 3, 1868, that he hopes that the word “ptyx,” which he was using in his sonnet “Her pure nails …” (which critics now call the “sonnet inix”), “does not exist in any language” because that would give him “the charm of creating it by the magic of the rhyme” (p. 1488).⁶ To Mallarmé, the meaning of “ptyx”—and of the whole poem—is unimportant in comparison to the word's—and to the entire poem's—evocative, mysterious and even mystical powers. In July 1868, Mallarmé wrote Henri Cazalis that this sonnet's “meaning, if it has one (but I would console myself with the opposite thanks to the dose of poetry it includes, it seems to me) is evoked by an internal mirage of the words themselves. In murmuring it several times one experiences a rather cabalistic sensation” (p. 1489). Meaning—or its opposite—is suggested here by what is beautiful but intangible, perceptible but unattainable, alluring but evanescent: the “internal mirage of the words themselves.” This mirage is a vision created by the words, contained, closed in (Mallarmé uses the word “renferme”), concealed—yet also revealed—by the words. And this mirage, like all mirages, is bound to delight, and to deceive. For Mallarmé, the experience of poetry, an experience that is filled with hope even as it struggles ceaselessly against imminent annihilation, emptiness, nothingness and despair—the mirage that may, that will vanish—is like an esoteric and spiritual ecstasy. It is mysterious, mystical, cabalistic. One is entranced and transported by the poet's words in the way that one experiences and is exalted by practicing a religious rite. One enters into, and becomes part of, the ecstasy.

Other ways in which Mallarmé shocks the reader in order to make him grasp the full and pristine, the holy value of words, include his resorting to preciosity and periphrasis, elaborate verbal imagery orchestrated through sounds to evoke sensations, impressions and visions. To imply that the woman in “The hair flight of a flame …” wears no rings on her fingers, Mallarmé says that she moves “no star nor fires on her finger.” A suicide full of gore and glory is the way he suggests a sunset in “Victoriously the beautiful suicide fled / Firebrand of glory, blood through foam, gold, tempest!” His images call upon a military conquest, beauty, fear and flight; flames and splendor; the darkness, tumult and destruction of a storm; death and drowning; blood that is horrible, but may be holy; gold that images richness, jewelry, brightness, beauty and purity.

In Mallarmé's utterances about poetry and in his poetry itself, there are persistent overtones of the spiritual. In “Solennité” (“Solemnity”), he speaks of “the ministry of the Poet” (p. 336). Often there is a delicate balancing of the physical and emotional with the religious, what Robert Greer Cohn so aptly calls Mallarmé's “real and poetic hunger for the supremely sensuous Infinite.”⁷ For poetry is a religion to Mallarmé, and the poet is a kind of priest who, in performing the rites of the word/Word, serves as an intermediary between the divine and those who would commune with the Mystery.

In what is called Mallarmé's “Autobiography” (his letter of November 16, 1885 to Verlaine), Mallarmé writes that he dreamed of the “Great Work … a book. … I shall go farther, I shall say: the Book. … The Orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the sole duty of the poet and the literary game par excellence” (pp. 662-63). The word “Orphic” evokes poetry, entrancing music, the occult, oracular pronouncements, and the Orphic mysteries celebrating the dismemberment and rebirth of the god Dionysus. The poet for Mallarmé is both Orpheus with his lyre and Dionysus torn apart—sacrificed, made sacred thereby—and reborn, in the Poem. More, the sacrificed and re-created Dionysus may be seen as the image of Mallarmé's poetic language: the word ripped from its ordinary context, the sentence torn asunder, in order to be reborn, pristine and pure—reshaped as the poem, the symbol of everlasting life. In this mystical setting, the word “game” (“le jeu”) is shocking and richly suggestive. The word startles, dramatizing Mallarmé's revolutionary use of language. “Le jeu” may imply an amusement that follows rules (games that children—or adults—play); gambling, with its financial, moral and spiritual risks; a medieval play (the theater was dear to Mallarmé); or a performance, the way an actor interprets a role. For Mallarmé, the game—or Game—assumes metaphysical connotations, veiling and unveiling the nature of being, the essence of things. “A lace annuls itself totally / In the supreme Game's uncertainty,” he begins one sonnet. “This mad game of writing,” he says in his lecture about Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, “to arrogate to oneself by virtue of a doubt—the drop of ink related to the sublime night—the duty to re-create everything” (p. 481). Many themes are united here: madness (like the Dionysian or Orphic frenzy), the game, doubt, the poet's arrogance and duty, and his search for the sublime. Writing, that Mallarmé calls a game, a recreation, is also, profoundly, for him a re-creation: “the duty to re-create everything.” In this perspective, the poet is a kind of god. His poetry is metaphysics, music and mystery; agony and exaltation; “the Orphic explanation of the Earth.” His poetry is a game that torments and transcends, a religion that is sensuous, spiritual and, always, self-renewing. “Poetry,” writes Mallarmé, “is the expression, by means of human language brought back again to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: it thus endows with authenticity our sojourn and constitutes the sole spiritual task.”⁸

For these four French symbolist poets—and to some extent for all the writers one may call symbolist—art is a kind of religion, a supreme aesthetic experience that seeks to penetrate and to transmit, to discover and to re-create, the mystery; the invisible, ineffable, intangible and secret; the evanescent and eternal; the sensuous that is at once bodily, mental, emotional and spiritual. Such revelations are necessarily disturbing, shocking, unnerving—and exhilarating. Often, and in different ways, these poets jolt you, arouse you, grasp you, and transport you—even Verlaine, whose poetry at first, but only at first and not upon closer examination, seems so disarmingly simple. Art for these poets is the transmission of ultimate experience: of life, or of Life. And their poetic word, through the symbol, seeks to veil—and to unveil—the Mystery.

Notes

1. See, for example, Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Random House, 1967); James R. Lawler, The Language of French Symbolism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969); Henri Peyre, Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974); and Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931).

2. See his excellent book Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme? (note 1 above). Unless otherwise noted, all translations throughout are my own.

3. “Hérésies artistiques: L'Art pour tous” (“Artistic Heresies: Art for Everyone”) in Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1945), p. 257. For the other three poets, I quote from the following editions: Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961); Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972), and Paul Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962). Unless otherwise stated, all references to the four poets are to these four editions. I give English titles for poems translated in this book; for other works, I list the French titles first.

4. For studies of these poems, see Enid Rhodes Peschel, “Rimbaud's ‘Les Corbeaux’: A Hymn of Hopelessness—and of Hope,” French Review, Vol. LII, No. 3 (Feb. 1979), 418-22; and “Shame” in Enid Rhodes Peschel, Flux and Reflux: Ambivalence in the Poems of Arthur Rimbaud, Preface by Étiemble (Geneva: Droz, 1977), pp. 71-78.

5. See Robert L. Mitchell, “From Heart to Spleen: The Lyrics of Pathology in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry” in Medicine and Literature, ed. Enid Rhodes Peschel (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1980), pp. 153-59.

6. In 1940, Emilie Noulet pointed out that before Mallarmé, Victor Hugo had used the word “ptyx,” which has a Greek origin, in Le Satyre, but as a proper noun and not as a common noun. She noted that the Greek dictionary gives for “ptyx”: “the sense of folds and recesses [windings, coils] of an organ and cites an example in which ‘ptyx’ means oyster shell” (Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, p. 1490).

7. See his outstanding book Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), p. 49.

8. Letter of June 27, 1884 to Léo d'Orfer in Mallarmé, Correspondance II: 1871-1885 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 266.