1. SOME IDEAS ON ART, LIFE, AND NATURE

From the early nineteenth century on, there are aspects of French aesthetic thought which stand out from contemporary English and German theory and anticipate the characteristic ideas on art of a later period. In fact, the first deeply influential and significant volume of French romantic poetry, Victor Hugo's Les Orientales (1829), has, both in its preface and contents, features whose consequences extend beyond what we normally think of as the chronological limits of French romanticism. The poems, which are set in parts of the Mediterranean world remote from Paris, are presented as the reveries of a city-dweller. Their style is, in comparison to previous French poetry, rich in evocations of light, color, line, and detail. In the preface Hugo compares the individual poems to paintings and to the varied architectural monuments of an old Spanish city; the book as a whole he characterizes as a useless one of pure poetry. A work of art which is constructed with skill out of the dead materials of pigment, canvas, or stone is pure artifice, not a natural object; the additional presentation of it as resembling a reverie could, in a sense, imply a certain remoteness from the immediate emotions of life. Hugo's conception of his art in Les Orientales acquires significance when we compare it to the ideas of imagination and organic form typical of English and German aesthetics in the early nineteenth century. Certainly the English romantics' idea of imagination as the faculty encompassing the totality of human and natural experience conjoined resulted in poetry which embodied a greater span of vital perceptions and feelings than Hugo's notion of art implied. The theory of the imagination as it gave both shape and theme to poems was the most powerful aesthetic of the early nineteenth century.

The word imagination was current in eighteenth-century France as it was in England, and was similarly associated with poetry descriptive of nature—which, in France, was largely imitated from English work. The final philosophical elaboration of this term, however, did not occur; imagination did not take on the suggestion of an essential higher life force relating the ideas of God, nature, and love.¹ As a result, French nature poetry, as exemplified in the work of Alphonse de Lamartine and in Hugo's work of the 1830s, seems far closer to the aesthetic of James Thomson's The Seasons, the epitome of the eighteenth-century love of nature, than it does to William Wordsworth or Percy Bysshe Shelley. Personifications and pathetic fallacy, more than mythic life, generally inform it. Nature is simply the pleasant experience of the countryside uplifted with thoughts about life or God.² Even without knowing it to be the case, as with Hugo, one might have the impression nature poetry was written by someone who vacationed in the countryside but whose most decisive experiences were those of a city-dweller. On the other hand, the poetry of the English romantics or, especially among the Germans, of Joseph von Eichendorff, conveys the point of view of someone whose life is completely involved in nature, the inhabitant at most of a village. This is, of course, an artistic matter, not one of circumstances: one would never guess that Eichendorff spent his days toiling as a bureaucrat in large cities.

The idea that a poem is an object made from materials and not a living thing parallel to nature may seem to reflect on Hugo's part a continuing adherence to that side of neoclassical theory which saw art as craft. This is not at all surprising: neoclassicism was not, from the early nineteenth-century French point of view, merely an episode in the history of literature, it was the French tradition and French art itself, renaissance and baroque works constituting more a group of irregular forms than a coherent tradition of their own. 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).

Hugo's other major statement, besides the comparison of poems to the fine arts, takes on its significance only in regard to a favorite neoclassical dictum: his declaration that Les Orientales is a useless book is intended as an allusion to the theory, after Horace, of joining the utile to the dulce, which appealed to the unitarian thinking of neoclassicists. By the useful Horace meant, of course, the moral exemplum of art, and by useless Hugo meant, of course, that his poems were not didactic like eighteenth-century odes. The sense of these terms, however, was shortly modified by Théophile Gautier, principally in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. The useful Gautier equated not with moral suasion but with the practically and commercially useful, and his example was the lieux d'aisance. This leap of ideas was not completely far-fetched: the bourgeois public's often conservative, neoclassical views of art were reinforced by the Saint-Simonian doctrine which maintained both that practical usefulness and flourishing commerce were a high goal and that art should make itself useful by lofty moral teachings. Gautier chose to reduce the two senses of the utile to one for polemical purposes. However, there is also a far-reaching implication in his talk of latrines and Ghiberti's doors; he has strengthened Hugo's perhaps largely implicit notion of the poem as a rich object and made it clear that this object has no place in the world of moral purposefulness. The character of the poem as artifact suggests, as Hugo's comparison already had, that the sensory value of art should predominate, that poetry should contain luxuriant imagery, as neoclassical poetry did not. Furthermore, the poem might not simply be morally useless, it might be antimoral or immoral. Beyond this lies a further dialectic step: it can be maintained that there is a higher code of values than that of the middle-class reading public, that there is a morality of art subsuming the ordinary notions of moral and immoral.

Gautier suggests the nature of such an ethic to some extent in the text of Mademoiselle de Maupin, but the poet most concerned with reconciling the notions of art and morality was Charles Baudelaire, who returned to the question time after time in his critical writings. What is perhaps most arresting about Baudelaire's thinking on the subject is the impression he gives that art contains morality: that art does not merely imitate the moral conflicts implicit in life but that nearly everything important in life, such as morality, is lesser than and embraced by art. This is, however, merely an impression, a tendency in Baudelaire's thinking; he was sufficiently under the sway of traditional religious conceptions that he could not replace God by art; something remained outside art and was at least of equal importance.

There is one other among Baudelaire's many and sometimes contradictory thoughts on art that is relevant here: the distinction between art and nature, implicit in both Hugo and Gautier's comparisons of poetry with carved stone or bronze, becomes explicit in Baudelaire's view of a hierarchy of values in which art is above nature, the latter being flawed by original sin. (Baudelaire sometimes takes the next step and identifies art with redemption.) This has consequences for poetic imagery; “la froide majesté de la femme stérile” and similar expressions convey the idea that beauty is opposed to life because it is opposed to nature. (This is by no means Baudelaire's only conception of beauty, but it was an influential one.) Another opposition between beauty and life, which is based on quite different assumptions, is found in Charles Leconte de Lisle's poetry and theorizing. There, present-day life, supposedly based on a commerce of the utile alone, is consciously ignored in favor of evocations of the remote in space or time. Nature appears, but is exotic and alien; life assumes a distant, heroic, and mythic character. Although Leconte de Lisle intended his poetry to exalt truth, beauty, and pristine vital forces, the embodiments of these are at such a remove from our ordinary sense of reality that they paradoxically have appeared lifeless to many readers despite intense sensory imagery.

Leconte de Lisle was content with the conception of poetry as a craft; Baudelaire timidly and metaphorically called it evocative sorcery, but Hugo, in the last phase of his career, and later poets found it necessary to have recourse to transcendental notions in order to account for their creative activity. The concept of the logos (le Verbe) occurs in Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud, the supernatural “mystery of a name” in Mallarmé's picture of an Adam-poet ordering the world. Vision and sight, meaning the perception of normally invisible realms, are other terms common to the three poets; Mallarmé used the word “idea” as well, in the sense of a higher reality.³ None of these notions is really explored: they serve their purpose of characterizing poetry as coming from beyond life or being above it, and the essential is that they do not put poetry in conflict with life, practical or otherwise, but obviate the possibility of comparing the two, just as one would not compare the infinite with the finite. The various oppositions typical of earlier poetic theory yield, especially in Mallarmé's thought, to a harmonious view of an ascending scale with art at its transcendental summit: art is no longer a beautiful object which can be placed opposite a practical one.

In Hérodiade, the mystery (the sense is religious and theatrical at once) which Mallarmé worked on at various times in the course of his life and never finished, Salome, who is here given her mother's name, and John the Baptist represent beauty and the artist: John's glance violates the princess, his death comes as a result, and the “cold jewels” of Hérodiade, her sterile nature, “open.” It is from having absorbed John's life that she, no longer a princess, “triumphs as queen.”⁴ After the imagery of metal, moon, and ice, which has earlier characterized her, there is a synthesis symbolized by sexual union between life and the inorganic.

Hérodiade reflects the persistence in the nineteenth century of the belief that there is a category of things subsumed under the idea of the beautiful: of course, instead of the neoclassicists' version of the beau idéal, nineteenth-century poets chose their own imagery—in which we find the gold and jewels and decor of Mallarmé's poem—but the habit of thinking of the beautiful as a prestigious class of things remains a characteristic neoclassical one. At some point, however, Mallarmé began to realize that the beauty of a poem comes from structural relations, not just from specific images, and with this he moved into a new perspective on art. Up to this time, the English and German organic theory of poetic form was undoubtedly superior to any thinking done about it in France; now, however, Mallarmé's new definition of poetry as “music in the Greek sense, basically meaning a rhythm among relationships” avoided the distracting vegetal associations of the organic theory and permitted Mallarmé to use quotidian imagery like furniture and to focus on questions of design, the more essentially poetic element in poetry.⁵ Mallarmé had arrived at this aesthetic conception by meditating on music, of which he knew little and had no technical knowledge. His ignorance, however, seems to have preserved him from the supposedly Wagnerian ideas current in late nineteenth-century France, according to which music is primarily a matter of repetition.

Mallarmé's theory of art as relationships is of considerable value in confronting many poems of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It suits, for example, symbolic poems, like some of Wallace Stevens', in which the whole meaning depends on sensing the bonds between two or more somewhat cryptic objects or creatures. In a sense, it does for much modern poetry what the idea of imagination did for English romantic nature poetry: it is relevant to both the formal conception of the poem and its subject; it provides a general idea of much subtlety and flexible application.

The movements in French aesthetics we have been surveying are generally referred to as l'art pour l'art, a term I have avoided because it seems to say something rather simple but actually encompasses quite diverse positions and currents of thought. The evolution of ideas on art from the beginnings of romanticism to the final stage of Mallarmé's aesthetic has, as I have sketched it, certain correspondences to poetic imagery. It is by no means the only sequence of aesthetic conceptions that could be traced: indeed, the more closely one studies them, the more it appears that from each idea one could move to any one of several others in a proliferation of dialectic. The aesthetic thought of Baudelaire or Mallarmé, for example, can be reduced to a system only by ignoring various implications and by limiting the conflicting tendencies one allows to become apparent. The nineteenth century was not, as I choose to see it, so much a period of critics and doctrinaires as a time when the practical aesthetics of poets and novelists were both abundantly recorded and highly significant. Their wealth of ideas, set forth in a largely unsystematic fashion, makes every account of them an experiment in dialectic, and I have chosen the conceptions that seemed best to lead into the intense formal concerns of nineteenth-century poets.

2. THE MORPHOLOGY OF ROMANTIC LYRIC

The shifts in the conception of poetry in nineteenth-century France are related to, if not completely identifiable with, changes in the actual shaping of poems. These changes cannot be fully appreciated, however, without reference to the forms that preceded and persisted alongside the new ones. I shall attempt briefly to outline a morphology of the lyric in its principal romantic manifestations, with some indication of how poets were to deviate from them.

While romantic types of poems could be exemplified by the work of all the many minor poets published in Le Parnasse contemporain (1866), which is interesting as a kind of encyclopedia of French poetic common practice on the eve of Symbolism, I shall refer rather to poems by more substantial figures. Perhaps an insignificant piece would, through its lack of general salience, illustrate more clearly this or that tendency in poetic structure; on the other hand, major poems, or at least the work of major poets, provide valuable examples of the range of effect possible within the limits of a specific rhetorical configuration. Reference can usefully be made not only to English and German romantic poetry but also to the work of the great French innovators of the late nineteenth century; in Rimbaud, and especially in Mallarmé, many basic patterns of earlier poetry persist, as they do even in Valéry. In the very middle of the century, Baudelaire is a particularly rich source of illustration of well-articulated rhetorical structures. What follows is based on extensive attempts to classify large bodies of poetry, such as all of John Keats and Shelley's lyrics, the complete works of the major French poets, William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Friedrich Hölderlin's body of work, a generous representation of Goethe's lyric poetry, and so forth. While I do not doubt that it has imperfections, there seems to be an undeniable and even surprising limit on the poetic structures one is likely to find.

The structures we are going to examine have, as their general characteristic, 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. While the rhetorical relationships may be at least hypothetically formulated for any discourse, the body of poetry we are dealing with does not, as a rule, accidentally or intentionally create confusions between the speaking voice or subject, to use a grammatical analogy, and the various objects, as happens in modern poems rendering consciousness, where the speaker's mental activity and what he perceives may fuse. 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, distinctions which are often not at all clear in an inner monologue like “L'Après-midi d'un faune.” Another characteristic of well-defined rhetorical forms is that we can perceive the poem's reference as general, exemplary, or particular; in Rimbaud's “Mémoire,” on the other hand, we cannot readily be certain whether the experience is that of one person or not. Figurative language is often found in exemplary poems, where its symbols, if not transparent, suggest the tradition of the parable rather than the modern kind of symbolism, in which important words may be cryptic or a strange figure or object appear, like the grey jar set down in Tennessee in one of Wallace Stevens' poems. Visionary lyrics of great resonance in the larger context of the poetry of Shelley, Blake, or Novalis commonly lend themselves to an at least momentarily satisfactory limited interpretation. While longer works, notably those of Blake, may offer considerable difficulty, the short poem tends to illustrate readily the desire to move an audience in some way, the original sense of rhetoric, in virtue of which we can answer the questions of from whom, to whom, and about what. On the other hand, some modern poems, such as Valéry's “Les Vaines Danseuses,” convey little about speaker, subject, or hearer.

Certain speech situations directed at second persons, present or absent, provide very clear-cut forms: invitation, prayer, invocation, question, command, prohibition, interlocution (of which only one side may be represented), and the hortatory kind of imperative found in Paul Verlaine's “Art poétique.” Rhetoric has terms for these, whereas some modern uses of the second person, like that at the beginning of Verlaine's “Clair de lune,” completely elude classification. In rhetorical poetry there are various ways in which content can be structured within the traditional second person categories, as we shall see later. What must be remembered, however, is that great ranges of tone and situation are encompassed within them, however elementary they seem when reduced to a list. Poems 25 to 55 of Les Fleurs du mal contain most of the second person patterns, and in them we can observe another strong rhetorical element, which determines not form in a narrow sense, but the purpose of communication: praise and blame. Ode and satire (which, of course, may be third person as well as second) are obvious forms of praise and blame, and the ode in particular, taken in this general sense of a poem exalting its subject, accounts for an impressive amount of high lyric poetry. It persists in some modern poems like Mallarmé's “Toast funèbre.” Even in poems not normally thought of as odes, the matter of praise is abundantly found. In contrast, we might imagine a kind of modern poem in which praise or blame or their causes is entirely implicit. In Guillaume Apollinaire's “Un Soir,” furthermore, we cannot easily tell whether it is praise or blame that is implicit, although one or the other clearly is. In romantic and earlier poetry, the definition of second persons and the attitude taken toward them are often clarified by their falling into certain traditional categories: mistress, fellow-poet, the Christian God, patron, king, and so forth. On the whole, the poem addressed to someone or something seems to show most distinctly the changes that have come over poetry in the last century or two: from Greek and Latin lyric through European neoclassicism and much romantic poetry, the conceiving of the poem as a well-delineated act of address, and the explicit use of the second person helps circumscribe genres within the lyric and generally to suggest the specific occasion, real or fictional, of which the poem is a record. Mallarmé's “Hommage” to Richard Wagner, on the interpretation of which there is little agreement, shows how the kind of occasion and the degree of praise can be quite enigmatic in more modern work.

The apostrophe or invocation directed toward something personified is a special case of poetry of the second person in that it often is joined with much self-revelation on the part of the speaking first person: the “Ode to the West Wind” is only one of many of Shelley's poems that have this dual character. Before the rise of the dramatic monologue, even poems dominated by the first person (like Keats' nightingale ode) often have some second person point of reference. Both romantic odes show, furthermore, the poem tending toward general statements about life, beauty, and art and making sense in a simple, limited way, if that is as far as the reader cares to go. Even first person poems we may think of as unrhetorical, such as the songs in Elizabethan plays, often are connected to the tradition of public utterance by the use of maxims or commonplaces, generalized wishes or deliberations. In the work of a number of modern poets, the place the ode had in English romanticism is occupied by the dramatic monologue, which is concerned with specifics rather than the general. The elusive, unrhetorical song, of which one authority said there were no examples in France before the last three decades of the nineteenth century,⁶ is associated with Verlaine during the 1870s and 1880s before becoming abundant in volumes of poetry by 1900. These two genres, Verlainesque song and dramatic monologue, represent, in the Symbolist period proper, the farthest evolution away from traditional rhetoric. There are also other genres worth considering, which occupy a kind of borderline between specific and general reference.

As much as romantic poets were concerned with the individual and even the idiosyncratic, it is still quite perceptible in their work that experiences tend to be treated as something of general value to all. Poems of memory, which are characteristic of the nineteenth century and especially of Baudelaire, can be almost narrative in movement as recollections unfold (“La Chevelure”); their subject finds its justification in its exemplary quality. It is characteristic of first person poems to take what is local and individual and make of it something typical; anecdote and self-portraits (not necessarily presented as being of the poet) work this way. Blake's “Little Black Boy” and a number of other lyrics or Baudelaire's “Spleen” poems, “Je suis comme le roi” and “J'ai plus de souvenirs,” illustrate the great possible range of self-portraits. Longer first person poems may have important narrative elements (Valéry's “Ebauche d'un serpent”), or various combinations of self-portrait, episode, and meditation. A special case of the latter occurs in Hugo, where reflective poems often lead to visions in which cosmic patterns are revealed (“Les Malheureux” and “Halte en marchant” in Les Contemplations). Such poems also show the difficulty of classifying sometimes ambiguous forms solely by grammatical persons: the import of Hugo's visions is never relevant only or primarily to the seer but carries the objectivity of third person accounts. Of course, the objectivity of generally valid statements and the truth to be found in human types underlies most romantic first person poems, and modern criticism's identification of fictitious speakers or personae in them, like the prophet of Hugo's visions, emphasizes this element of ethos, as traditional rhetoric called the creation of character based on moral-psychological types. It may be that with ingenuity we could classify the speakers of all modern first person poems, but the aim of the poet often seems to be the devising of some startling, elusive, and even mysterious figure. Many of Jules Laforgue's speakers in Les Complaintes are of this sort, like the virgin King of Thule or the Munis (sages) of Montmartre.

Third person poetic genres include anecdotes, short narratives, portraits, and scenes. Hugo's Légende des siècles abounds in the first two; in Rimbaud, “Les Assis” and “Le Forgeron” typify the others. Speeches and narrative may be joined, notably in some of Alfred de Vigny's poems like “La Colère de Samson” or “Le Mont des oliviers.” Characteristic of all these are the great overtness of praise and blame, that is of the rhetorical motivation, and the frequency of historical or legendary material, with an attendant implication of exemplarity. These poetic narratives or fragments of narration make, if anything, only moderate use of novelistic plot devices like ellipsis. In Rimbaud's “Les Premières Communions” and some other poems, on the other hand, we shall find interesting parallels with modern fiction. Finally, from “Le Bateau ivre” to Dylan Thomas' “Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait,” we find symbolic works with plot, or at least action, and some analogy to the allegorical tradition. In the case of the Thomas poem at least, it is clear that its technique goes beyond the romantic hermeticism of Blake and Gérard de Nerval.

In romantic poems which are not narratives, scenes, or portraits, we can distinguish structural principles shaping the body of the poem. Poetic arguments can be put together with an incremental movement, a unified tone, and perhaps rising intensity (“Au lecteur” in Les Fleurs du mal). Often this pattern seems enumeratory as in Baudelaire's “Les Phares.” The opposite principle is conflictual movement, in which antithesis, with or without resolution, dominates (Mallarmé's “Las de l'amer repos” and Baudelaire's “Causerie”) and may, in especially elaborate cases, be complicated by overt paradoxes (“Le Voyage” in Les Fleurs du mal). The conceit (Mallarmé's “La chevelure vol”) is generally a paradoxical argument that makes ordinary logic untenable. In general, the arguments of antithetical or incremental poems have a reasonable show of logical coherence, and occasionally we find a poem with a fairly formal kind of reasoning (the first piece of Les Contemplations, for example). The great meditations like “Tintern Abby” have, of course, an important element of psychological development, as well as an adequate logical one, and this combination can be found in some modernist poems like Stevens' “Le Monocle de mon oncle” or “The Idea of Order at Key West” and Valéry's “Le Cimetière marin.” These also show that stanzaic forms in meditation can lead to highly epigrammatic effects. What we do not find in all the poems we have mentioned is the seemingly irrelevant associative movement which imparts a deceptive stream-of-consciousness-like surface to many modern poems and of which an unusual, early example is to be encountered in Baudelaire's “Le Cygne.”

Incremental and antithetical patterns of argument often are combined with other rhetorical units such as elaborate addresses in the second person, descriptions or the noting of perceptions, or analogies (which, by themselves, of course, constitute the whole of some short poems: Mallarmé's “Les Fenêtres,” or, in a less formalized, bipartite manner, “M'introduire dans ton histoire”). Some poems, like Hölderlin's “Der Rhein,” are great composite structures in which we see a number of elements: in the Hölderlin poem we find a narrative of the Rhine's birth and course, an expository meditation on the gods, an apostrophe to Rousseau, a generalization with the specific example of Socrates, and an address to the friend to whom the poem is dedicated. Finally, the ending of a poem is often a distinctive unit in itself, though following from what precedes: sententiae (Keats' “Grecian Urn”), images (Keats' gathering swallows in the “Ode to Autumn” and countless poems by Hugo), rhetorical questions (the “Ode to a Nightingale”), the dialectic resolution of an antithesis (Baudelaire's “Hymne à la beauté”), in French an imposing quadripartite line with special sound repetitions and deployment of long vowels (“Et l'avare silence et la massive nuit,” Mallarmé: “Toast funèbre”) or some other rhetorical pattern (Baudelaire's “Voyage à Cythère” with its prayer, or the apostrophe of “Au lecteur”).

Modern poets have moved away from romantic poetic structures not only by using the dramatic monologue, which has a lesser degree of logical articulation than the meditation, but also in their tendency to use general statements without any easily traceable logical connection between them; rather, such disconnected statements often occur in dense patches of imagery, which is, itself, difficult to interpret. Apollinaire's “Le Brasier” and “Les Fiançailles” are excellent illustrations. Another feature of such statements is that they sometimes say exactly what one does not expect: “Beauty is momentary in the mind— / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal” (Wallace Stevens: “Peter Quince at the Clavier”). Countless poets have warned that beauty is most perishable in the flesh and survives only in verse. Modern poems that consist solely of juxtaposed images without commentary (like Mallarmé's “Ses purs ongles”) are by no means necessarily harder to interpret than the mysterious sententiousness of Rimbaud, Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Hart Crane, and Dylan Thomas.

A last element of poetic texture, which we have only mentioned in passing, is natural description, bringing us to a significant characteristic of romantic poetry: while description is inseparable from the English concept of imagination and the French idea of the poem as a richly colored object, it is nearly always handled as a coordinate or subordinate in the poem rather than as an independent, autonomous rhetorical entity. (A special exception can be found, at least theoretically, in descriptions designed to dazzle through artfulness and enargeia, as vividness was called.) The reason for this is that description, unless accompanied by even a slight interpretive analogy, represents a kind of neutral discourse, which does not fulfill the rhetorical purpose of influencing or moving. In the rhetorical tradition, even what may seem the most obvious symbolic functions of description, such as the equivalence between a winter landscape and old age, cannot exist without an explicit correlative. A new autonomy of description will be seen in more recent poetry.

The possibility of formulating, however briefly, a morphology of lyric based on the rhetorical tradition suggests that deviations from these patterns may also present themselves in recurrent types, and, furthermore, that the very absence of certain rhetorical features will be of use in interpretation of these forms. Here is the place to consider the new ideas that came to modify poets' handling of traditional poetic structures.

3. IMPERSONALITY AND OBJECTIVITY

The idea of impersonal poetry in France, free of an overt rhetoric of praise and blame, is usually thought of as evolving in reaction to an emotive theory of poetry current in the romantic period. Actually, as we have seen, the conception of the poem as a beautiful object, from which a notion of impersonal poetry is easily derived, is quite as characteristic of French romanticism, but for the general public, the seemingly personal work of Alfred de Musset and his imitators, detested by most later poets, occupied the foreground. There is definitely a question of the sociology of literature here: as the bourgeoisie of 1830 had seemed utilitarian and neoclassical in its taste and thereby hardly amenable to the idea of poetry as gratuitous beauty, the bourgeoisie now appeared in the mid-century, because of its sentimentality, hostile to the further evolution of aesthetic thought in the direction of the autonomy of art. Moreover, the emotive theory of poetry was an eighteenth-century development, already present in Lamartine's predecessors, and therefore quite as conservative as neoclassicism: hence the connection between the new antibourgeois society, bohemia, and the new poetics of art for art's sake.

The most insistent theorist and practitioner of impersonal poetry in the mid-century was Leconte de Lisle, and the interest of his poetry and polemics lies in the fact that he provided ideas about verse which were a point of departure for later theorists, as well as a model of style which persisted through to the early twentieth century. (Many poets were to write, in not necessarily any evolutionary sequence, “Symbolist” poems and Parnassian ones, by which is usually meant an imitation of Leconte de Lisle's manner.) Leconte de Lisle derived certain general principles of style from the practice of Hugo, Vigny, and Gautier: the cult of euphony and the beau vers, generous adjectivation, abundant descriptions of a highly plastique character, unity of tone (he differs considerably from Baudelaire on this score), and polished conclusions for his poems. He had little imagination for metaphor, which is surely a factor in the monotony of his admirably finished verse. There is a curious resemblance between Leconte de Lisle's idea of a style generally valid for all worthy subjects and neoclassical aesthetics; this did not escape him.⁷ The idea uniting all these technical features is that of controlled emotion objectified and sustained through representations of things, figures, and events in all the elements of color, light, line, sound, and movement necessary to fix it. The narrow range of Leconte de Lisle's subjects, which, although vast as history and the greater continents, carefully excluded the local and modern, should not detract unduly from an interestingly thought-out ideal and achievement.

Impersonality is implicit perhaps in Leconte de Lisle's choice of subjects, but the technique of presenting the subject is also relevant. At the same time as Flaubert was working out the theory of the absent author in the novel, Leconte de Lisle was experimenting with poems devoid of the poetic equivalent of authorial intervention and therefore of the rhetorical persuasions of didacticism and sentimentality. By no means are all his poems free from commentary on their subject (any more than Flaubert's novels truly are). Some poems, like “La Mort de Valmiki,” have an interventional narrative technique almost like that of passages in Honoré de Balzac; in other poems the presence of the author is a relative matter, best judged by the standards of contemporary or previous poetry. Occasionally Leconte de Lisle reaches a high degree of impersonality, as in “Paysage polaire,” which in the quatrains exemplifies his command of imitative harmony and in the tercets his often elegant syntactic arrangements:

Un monde mort, immense écume de la mer,
Gouffre d'ombre stérile et de lueurs spectrales,
Jets de pics convulsifs étirés en spirales
Qui vont éperdument dans le brouillard amer.
Un ciel rugueux roulant par blocs, un âpre enfer
Où passent à plein vol les clameurs sépulcrales,
Les rires, les sanglots, les cris aigus, les râles
Qu'un vent sinistre arrache à son clairon de fer.
Sur les hauts caps branlants, rongés des flots voraces,
Se roidissent les Dieux brumeux des vieilles races,
Congelés dans leur rêve et leur lividité;
Et les grands ours, blanchis par les neiges antiques,
Çà et là, balançant leurs cous épileptiques,
Ivres et monstrueux, bavent de volupté.

A dead world, the sea's immense foam, an abyss of sterile shadow and spectral glimmers; bursts of convulsive peaks drawn out into coils, which move, dazed, through the bitter fog. A rough sky rolling in blocks, a harsh hell in which fly sepulchral cries, laughter, sobs, harsh shouts, and death-rattles, all torn from the sinister wind's iron horn. On the high, trembling promontories, gnawed by the ravenous waves, stiffen the misty gods of ancient races, frozen in their dream and leaden pallor. And the great bears, pale from the age-old snow, here and there, their epileptic necks quivering, drunk and monstrous, slaver with lust.

This kind of implicit commentary on the survival of the life force in horrible circumstances is much in the vein of Flaubert's conception of the artist as everywhere present in his work but nowhere visible.

“Paysage polaire” provides us with our first example of a description free from any coordinate statement. That it is not obscure comes from the contrast we immediately sense with landscapes of harmonious life, but ultimately we have to refer to the survival of the fittest, to nineteenth-century science and its hypothesis that the universe would perish in cold, and to the philosophical pessimism supported by that science, in order to see that this is not a poem primarily about hell or sexuality. In other words, the subject is covert, and the impersonality of technique permits an at least theoretical ambiguity. If the ambiguity here seems negligible, there are descriptions, and not only in more obscure modern poets, in which the sense of the poem is problematic. Shelley wrote an uncharacteristic piece of straight description called “Evening: Ponte al mare, Pisa” which is not easy to interpret, and the same is true of a rather impassive description from Verlaine's early period entitled “L'Heure du berger.” Verlaine wrote in a letter some years later of his plans for long poems about things from which man would be completely banished.⁸ He did not write the poems, but the technical and theoretical interest in the possibilities of this kind of poetry had occurred to him as it would, in various forms, to other poets.

The most elaborate theory of impersonal poetry is to be found in Mallarmé's letters of 1866 and 1867. Mallarmé went through an acute spiritual crisis in those years, which began with meditations on the buddhistic themes of Maya, the veil of appearances, the ultimate nothingness of the world, and the Glorious Lie which poetry therefore must be. (These notions were familiar from the work of Leconte de Lisle, Mallarmé's friend Henri Cazalis, and the vulgarizers of the relatively newly translated oriental texts.) Through another friend or through a not very accurate article, Mallarmé next drew on Hegelian ideas, which he worked out in a highly personal way, the result being that, from despair over nothingness, he was saved by the triadic concept that Being and Nothingness are synthesized in an Absolute, which is art or beauty. Furthermore, beauty corresponds to the absolute idea of the universe, which presented itself to Mallarmé's mind. “Beauty … finds in the entire universe its correlative phases.”⁹ With this, beauty was removed from dream and chance, those being the characteristics of contingent, personal art. After the two-year crisis had passed, Mallarmé, who had undergone much physical suffering in the anguish of his discoveries, resigned himself to writing poems “merely tinged with the absolute.”¹⁰ The poetry of his maturity, as we shall see, reflects in its style a certain conception of impersonality.

With Rimbaud another term related to impersonality, but rather more problematic, enters our considerations. In the famous letters of May, 1871, Rimbaud contrasted objective poetry with its insipid subjective opposite. The prose is sometimes difficult to follow, but it is clear that Musset's personal poetry represents everything detestable in verse. Objective poetry, as it fitfully occurred in the romantics, comes from a force outside the poet of which he may even be unaware. This might be the sense of “Je est un autre,” but the source of the other voice, at least as it has manifested itself already in other poets, remains obscure, although Rimbaud calls it universal intelligence. The imagery he uses suggests less intelligence than a collective unconscious, and the expression “plenitude of the great dream” confirms this. In any case, what the poet brings back from “down there” can be formless in its essential character and expression, by which Rimbaud meant that it does not have the symmetries and unity of tone proper to form in the neoclassical tradition; the idea of organic form, which was totally unfamiliar to Rimbaud, would better suit the case.

The significance of the formless becomes clear when we look at the poems included in his letters. One, “Le Coeur supplicié,” is a kind of plaintive fool's song (fool's songs and mad songs occur in Hugo's Cromwell and Emile Verhaeren's Les Campagnes hallucinées; they are not so abundant as in English poetry). Other pieces are a repulsive portrait, “Accroupissements,” a punning account of the crushing of the Commune, and a violent, obscure vituperation against “Mes Petites Amoureuses.” Words and phrases in the latter sometimes border on the incomprehensible. The objectivity of these poems depends not only on their perhaps having been dictated by the universal soul (they are commonly taken as autobiographical); their dense, almost opaque style makes them indeed linguistic objects, which bear no resemblance to the transparent clichés of personal poetry. Here we have an important further development of the idea of the poem as object: obscurity of subject matter and complexity of expression give it the air of an artifact separated from its creator. Difficult poems have distance as much from the poet as from the reader, and the impossibility of readily seeing them as autobiographical or of penetrating the author's intentions, without special conjectures or information, precludes or should preclude local or anecdotal interpretations. Of course, the opposite argument can be maintained, that nothing is more subjective than hermetic language and, conversely, that commonplace idiom is objective; that, however, is a critic's point of view, not a poet's, and it is perfectly clear how, in the context of nineteenth-century French poetry and the prevalence in the reading public of a debased emotive theory of art as personal expression, Rimbaud evolved his theory of objectivity. Nor is this conception unique to him: it seems implicit in Tristan Corbière and later poets. Flaubert, speculating on possibilities in poetic style, suggested that for impersonality of subject matter, something related to the poet's life could be substituted, provided that it were “strange, disordered, so intense that it becomes creation.” What Flaubert is tacitly admitting is that the genetic argument, which seems often to lie behind the theory of impersonality, is not the issue: the real question is one of stylistic expression, not whether the subject comes from outside the poet's experience. Personal poetry as practiced was the poetry of cliché: creative language, whether dealing with personal anecdote, the poet's unconscious, the lives of others, or the universal intelligence, is objectivity.

The paradox inherent in the idea that an almost impenetrable metaphor, say, is more objective than a commonplace which everyone understands and uses, can be dispelled if we refer to the modern conception of the persona in literature. The most ordinary, direct form of expression does not always give the impression of a real, distinct, concrete person speaking. The personality in such circumstances is not clearly constituted, as Flaubert put it, through lack of precise details. What comes forth is such general and therefore approximate language that it lacks individual objectivity. Those who respond better to generalities and abstractions may have more highly evolved minds, as Remy de Gourmont thought, but less capacity for aesthetic discrimination and creativity. There is a middle ground, however, between the extremes, and it is worth noting that the persona envisaged by Flaubert and evolved by Rimbaud is slightly to one side of it: much poetry of earlier centuries assumes a speaker who is the poet in one of his conventional roles, but a poet and not a generalized ordinary man. What Rimbaud's practice implies is actually personae individualized according to the modern novelist's habit of trying to form a distinct consciousness for a character (as opposed to the pure type-characters of much fiction). This relation between modern fiction and poetry is only the first of several such rapprochements we shall observe.

Precise details and the communication of a feeling of personality bring us to one further nuance in poetic theory and practice: the objective poem can be thought of as attaining its goal through the representation of objects. This means that descriptive poems can convey something slightly different from the kind of covert theme we found in Leconte de Lisle's “Paysage polaire.” Their content may be a subjectivity whose rendering is objectified. Such an effect is clearly related to the idea of impersonality, but it is a further refinement and takes us beyond the domain of Leconte de Lisle's poetry and into the practice of poets associated with the term Symbolism.

Notes

1. Baudelaire's use of the word imagination strikes me as insignificant, as does his quoting an English source on the subject late in his career.

2. The theory of this poetry was formulated by Samuel Johnson in his essay on Denham. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (3 vols.; London: Oxford University Press, 1961), I, 54-62.

3. Mallarmé's use of idée is not usefully elucidated by relating it strictly to any specific philosophical system; as used by him and others, the Idea is sometimes transcendental beauty, sometimes the structural principle of the artwork, and sometimes the image evoked by a word.

4. Aside from the sections of Hérodiade Mallarmé published, we now have further fragments and his notes. See Stéphane Mallarmé, Noces d'Hérodiade: Mystère, ed. Gardner Davies (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

5. The quotation is from a letter to Edmund Gosse not in Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor (3 vols.; Paris: Gallimard, 1959-1969). See Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la Musique (Paris: Nizet, 1959), 75. I find Mallarmé's idea more subtle as a structural principle than the one of reconciliation of opposites, which supplemented the romantic organic theory.

6. See the preface to the 1903 edition of Edouard Schuré, Histoire du Lied (Paris: Perrin).

7. See the interview in Jules Huret, Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire (Paris: Charpentier, 1901), 280-85.

8. Letter of 16 May 1873 to Edmond Lepelletier. See Paul Verlaine, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Borel (2 vols.; Paris: Club du Meilleur Livre, 1959), I, 1035.

9. Letter of 17 May 1867 to Eugène Lefébure. See Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance 1862-1871 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 246.

10. Letter of 3 May 1868 to Eugène Lefébure. See Ibid., 273.