The Rhumb Line of Symbolism: French Poets from Sainte-Beuve to Valery: Presentation and Selected Texts

by Laurent Lesage

The self-styled Symbolist poets, this book holds, represent only an articulate phase of a steady course in French poetry from the Romantic period to the present. The direction taken by Romanticism, broadly defined, is that of the intuitive as against the rational, the subjective as against the objective—with a constant orientation toward individual liberty. Thus Symbolism can be properly placed in the line of all mystical, oracular, illuminist, or idealist traditions. In this broad view Symbolism includes both some of the greatest writers of 19th-century France and also many of the chief creative geniuses of the modern world. Viewed narrowly, the Symbolists are merely a swarm of pets grouping and regrouping themselves in the final fifteen years of the past century into ephemeral crews—Hydropaths, Hirsutes, Decadents, and other anti-Parnassians—with no poetic genius at the helm. The aim of this book is to reconcile the broad and narrow views of Symbolism. Its method is to give the ideas and experiences of twenty poets representative of the movement, together with a selection from their writings. Lying at the heart of Symbolist doctrine is the symbolic image. Since Symbolist poets have assumed phenomena to have symbolic value as indications of the world of ideas behind the world of appearances, they have deemed their role to be the revelation of this higher reality through symbolic imagery. First come three Romantic Sainte-Beuve, who exploited the vein of the humble and familiar; Bertrand, who used the quaint and the grotesque; and Nerval, who incorporated alchemy. Following the pantheistic Guérin come the three Symbolist Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine. Next come the two savage poets, Rimbaud and Lautréamont, and eight of the poets prominent in the heyday of the movement. The line leads to Valéry and Claudel, 20th-century geniuses of symbolist heritage. In addition to the presentation and selected texts, all poems are annotated, and a reading list is given for each poet.

266 pages, Hardcover

First published November 19, 1991