Between Baudelaire And Mallarme

As the status of poetry became less and less certain over the course of the nineteenth century, poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé began to explore ways to ensure that poetry would not be overtaken by music in the hierarchy of the arts. Helen Abbott examines the verse and prose poetry of these two important poets, together with their critical writings, to address how their attitudes towards the performance practice of poetry influenced the future of both poetry and music. Central to her analysis is the issue of 'voice', a term that remains elusive in spite of its broad application. Acknowledging that voice can be physical, textual and symbolic, Abbott explores the meaning of voice in terms of four categories: (1) rhetoric, specifically the rules governing the deployment of voice in poetry; (2) the human body and its effect on how voice is used in poetry; (3) exchange, that is, the way voices either interact or fail to interact; and (4) music, specifically the question of whether poetry should be sung. Abbott shows how Baudelaire and Mallarmé exploit the complexity and instability of the notion of voice to propose a new aesthetic that situates poetry between conversation and music. Voice thus becomes an important process of interaction and exchange rather than something stable or static; the implications of this for Baudelaire and Mallarmé are profoundly significant, since it maps out the possible future of poetry.

As the status of poetry became less and less certain over the course of the nineteenth century, poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé began to explore ways to ensure that poetry would not be overtaken by music in the hierarchy of the arts. Helen Abbott examines the verse and prose poetry of these two important poets, together with their critical writings, to address how their attitudes towards the performance practice of poetry influenced the future of both poetry and music. Central to her analysis is the issue of 'voice', a term that remains elusive in spite of its broad application. Acknowledging that voice can be physical, textual and symbolic, Abbott explores the meaning of voice in terms of four categories: (1) rhetoric, specifically the rules governing the deployment of voice in poetry; (2) the human body and its effect on how voice is used in poetry; (3) exchange, that is, the way voices either interact or fail to interact; and (4) music, specifically the question of whether poetry should be sung. Abbott shows how Baudelaire and Mallarmé exploit the complexity and instability of the notion of voice to propose a new aesthetic that situates poetry between conversation and music. Voice thus becomes an important process of interaction and exchange rather than something stable or static; the implications of this for Baudelaire and Mallarmé are profoundly significant, since it maps out the possible future of poetry.

The central theme here is the constant confrontation of theory and practice in the work of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry.

The book assesses the influence of music on the ideas and poetic practice of a number of late nineteenth-century poets. Particular attention is paid to the effect that the musical model supposedly had on the traditional ways of writing poetry, especially in the key areas of rhythm, sound-repetition and imagery. The chapters on Baudelaire and Mallarme relate their ideas on music to their more general theories of art and poetry and at the same time provide a suitable framework for a critical and evaluative discussion of the Symbolist poets' contribution to the music-poetry debate in the 1880s and 1890s."

Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea explores the concept of rhythm and its central yet problematic role in defining modern French poetry. Forging innovative lines of inquiry linking the detailed analysis of poetic form to the evolution of fundamental aesthetic principles, David Evans offers extensive new readings of the literary and critical writings of the three major poets at the centre of France’s most important poetic revolution. The volume is of interest to all students and readers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, since here is presented for the first time a thorough comparative study of developments in each writer’s poetic form and theory, focusing on the themes of illusion, deception and the musical metaphor. The book is also intended to stimulate wider critical debate on the interpretation of metrical verse, prose poetry and vers libre, and offers original analytical methods which facilitate the study of poetic form. The author proposes a radical shift in our understanding of the role and mechanisms of poetic rhythm, suggesting that its very resistance to definition and fixity provides a conveniently opaque veil over the difficulties of defining poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Resonant Gaps examines the ways in which Charles Baudelaire exploited certain powers of figurative language while writing on music, particularly that of Richard Wagner. Unlike many recent music/literature studies, Margaret Miner focuses less on the possible convergences of text and music than on their productive distances and divergences. At the heart of this study is Baudelaire's 1861 essay Richard Wagner et Tannhauser à Paris, which is included in this volume in the French text of the 1861 Dentu edition. Called a "long-meditated work of circumstance" by its author, Richard Wagner is the only piece of music criticism that Baudelaire ever attempted, despite the prominence of music as a theme and a metaphor throughout his writings. In the essay, says Miner, Baudelaire strove to erase the distinction between reading about Wagner's music and listening to it. Continually sidestepping expectations and evading classification, Baudelaire makes connections among musical understanding, concrete or spatial distance, and the abstract or conceptual distance between different arts. Miner discusses such topics related to Baudelaire's project as his repertoire of textual and rhetorical maneuvers, including italicization, quotation, personification, digression, and metaphor; his assessment of the music's seductive ability to surround and suffuse the listener; and the misunderstandings about and prejudices against Wagner and his music that hampered its critical reception in France. Throughout her study, Miner also refers to similar literary undertakings by Liszt, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, and Proust, which involved the music of Wagner and Debussy. Miner argues that Baudelaire's aim in attempting to lessen or suppress various distances that he discovers between his text and the music is not to freeze movement entirely but to inscribe his writing on Wagner's music so that the two might travel together over an aesthetic landscape that shelters rather than separates them.

This study of four major poets - Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Holderlin - examines the self-reflexivity of modern poetry, exploring questions concerning what it means for a poem to be "about" its own process of saying. What does it mean to read and understand a text that is focused not on its content but on its saying? What kind of relation does a writer have to the language used in a text? How are we to think about the relation of content to the saying? In the chapter on Mallarme, the author uses several close readings to investigate the referentiality of literature in general and the concept of "undecidability" in Mallarme. For example, in "A la nue accablante tu" he shows the way undecidability operates in syntax, metaphorics, sounds, and plays on individual letters of the alphabet. The chapter on Rimbaud explores the significance of the poet's famous statement "JE est un autre" ("I is an other"), leading to a meditation on the question of the control of the author, the relationship between saying and that which is said, the way in which language overwhelms the speaker. In the Baudelaire chapter, the author analyzes the themes of memory and imagination in Baudelaire's writings on painting and Victor Hugo, showing how these themes reveal the writer's thoughts on artistic conception and execution. The author then reads Holderlin's hymn "Der Rhein" with the fifth of Rousseau's "Reveries du promeneur solitaire," showing how in Holderlin's poem and other texts the crucial issue is a paradoxical relationship between lack and fullness or perfection. The final Holderlin chapter presents a sustained critique of Heidegger's exegesis of Holderlin, opening new avenues in the discussions of both Holderlin and Heidegger.