Leaving Parnassus The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud

  Leaving Parnassus The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud

  

FAUX TITRE

296

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

publiées sous la direction de

  

Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman,

Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

  

Seth Whidden

Leaving Parnassus

  

The Lyric Subject in

Verlaine and Rimbaud Illustration cover: Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-4). Photo : Graydon Wood. © Philadelphia Museum of Art: The George W. Elkins Collection, 1936.

  Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’.

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions

de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -

Prescriptions pour la permanence’.

  ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2210-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

  

Contents

  Chapter Three: Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space 119

  211 Index

  207 Bibliography

  194 Conclusion

  Time and Space, Illuminated 179 Hortense Found, in Time 183 Mouvement

  168

  Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Verse Poetry 131 Derniers vers: Pushing Limits, Stretching Out 138 On “Mémoire”

  125

  “la poésie objective” 122 “le dérèglement de tous les sens”

  Toward an Aesthetic of Decay 115

  Acknowledgments

  92 Favorite Positions 107

  75 After the Fall; or, The Subject, the Sacred, and the Profane

  69 Verlaine’s Poetics of Indecision

  52 The Love-Struck Subject

  45 Melancholia

  17 Chapter Two: Verlaine’s Identities

  9 Chapter One: The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

  7 Introduction

  225

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Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without exceptional gen- erosity from many; in the process of researching and writing it I have amassed a debt I will likely never fully repay. Parts of chapter two appeared in earlier versions in Revue Verlaine; similarly, earlier versions of portions of chapter three were published in Lire Rimbaud:

  

Approches critiques ; Parade sauvage; and Actes du colloque de

  . All are published here with permission and with

  Charleville de 2004 the grateful thanks of the author.

  Some friends and colleagues will find their names below; I hope that those whose names do not appear will understand that listing everyone on whom I have relied would create a book at least as long as the one you are currently reading (to say nothing of what that book’s index might look like).

  Thanks to Jan Rigaud, whose friendship has helped to make going to the office a pleasure. Similar gratitude goes to Lee Abraham, Jean Lutes, Charles Muskiet, Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Carlos Trujillo, and Béatrice Waggaman. It’s hard to imagine how one person could excel at simultaneously being a student, colleague, editor, mentor, and friend, but Jody Ross does it all, and with grace. The Dean’s office of Villanova’s College of Arts and Sciences granted me sabbatical leave to finish my manuscript; I shudder to think of what state it would still be in without that precious time away from the office. Christa Stevens and her colleagues at Rodopi have made working on this book so easy and enjoyable that I never grew sick of it. The cover artwork, Paul Cézanne’s stunning Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-4), appears courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was made available by generous funding from Villanova’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

  Numerous colleagues have received unsolicited requests for infor- mation, sometimes at inopportune moments; and yet, all rose to the occasion and answered the call, without fail. Present from the very

8 Leaving Parnassus

  beginning, Marie-Chantal Killeen continues to be an infinite source of warmth, friendship, and inspiration. Steve Murphy always replies, often within seconds, with an endless supply of kindness and encouragement, and usually with more information than I can process; many thanks to him for his generosity of time, thoughts, and office space. Yann Frémy helped with part of the Rimbaud chapter; ours has become a great working partnership. Sharon Johnson and Richard Shryock offered wonderful home cooking and friendly advice at a crucial juncture in the Verlaine chapter. David Powell pored over an early version of this manuscript; thanks to his scrupulous attention to detail, this is a much better book. Each of them in their own way, Dennis Minahen, Adrianna Paliyenko, and Gretchen Schultz are models of the kind of scholar I constantly strive to be. On separate occasions, Cathy Nesci and Roger Little brightened entire months on end with extremely encouraging unsolicited comments following conference presentations; their kindness will never be forgotten. Finally, I would not be able to answer Bill Thomas’s patented exis- tential question without him bringing me here in the first place.

  My parents and my sister have made it their business to follow a field of study about which they had previously known nothing; my success would be hollow if I couldn’t share it with them. Home away from home was provided, sometimes with no advance notice but always with a smile, by Chris and Cynthia Gorton; Hervé Hilaire; and Keith Martin and Eric de Gaudemont. College and grad school buddies, friends, and colleagues have all helped me enjoy my work in its proper context. Lastly, thanks to my good friends and neighbors on Cliff Island, Maine, the best place in the world to walk, think, read, write, swim, and fight fires.

  My children Carter and Posey have done precious little to help this book along; to the contrary, they gave me every possible reason to put it aside and spend more time with them. I can only hope that they appreciate how hard it was to say no – those times that I was able to do so – and that they see this book as proof that I was making good use of my time away from them.

  More than anyone else, this book is for R. Reed Whidden.

  S.W.

  

Introduction

  At the heart of this study of nineteenth-century French poetry lie questions fundamental to the entire genre of poetry. Despite varying degrees of success for the epic and the dramatic, French poetry of the nineteenth century was largely dominated by the lyric. Originally the medium through which a poet expressed innermost emotions, the lyric became synonymous with its subjective point of view. As Hegel explained:

  The content of a lyric work of art […] must be the individual person and therefore with all the details of his situation and concerns, as well as the way in which his mind with its subjective judgment, its joy, admiration, grief, and, in short, its feeling comes to consciousness of itself in and through such experiences. ¹ But an art form from a subject who sings (hence the “lyre” in “lyric”),

  and who sings a very personal song, has clear limits: namely, the emotional limits of its poet/source. Those who look for poetry to transcend individual experience and to speak to larger universals of the human condition voice disappointment similar to the one expressed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy:

  [...] we know the subjective artist only as a bad artist, and throughout the whole of art we demand above all else the conquest of the subjective, release from the “self,” and the silencing of all individual will and craving; indeed we cannot imagine a truly artistic creation, however unimportant, without objectivity, with- out a pure and disinterested contemplation. For this reason our aesthetic must first resolve the problem of how it is possible to consider the “lyric poet” as an artist: he who, in the experience of all ages, always says “I” and sings to us through the full chromatic scale of his passions and desires. ² ₁ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume II. Trans.

  T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1113. ₂ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York:

  10 Leaving Parnassus

  In addition to the negative reaction that the effusiveness of tradi- tional subjective poetry generated, the inherent limitations of language to express accurately one’s emotions created a palpable, unavoidable tension. All writers felt this struggle, but few expressed it as elo- quently as nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson: “[…] nous échouons à traduire entièrement ce que notre âme ressent: la pensée demeure incommensurable avec le langage” [we fail to translate entirely that which our soul feels: thought remains incommensurable

  3

  with language]. The questions that poets attempt to answer are the same: How can one express oneself and express true feelings in and through a language that only limits expression according to subjective interpretations of each word? How can a person be truly understood, given these linguistic limitations? For Bergson, language is an endless series of compromises between language and the feelings and thoughts that it approximates:

  […] nos perceptions, sensations, émotions et idées se présentent sous un double aspect: l’un net, précis, mais impersonnel; l’autre confus, infiniment mobile, et inexprimable, parce que le langage ne saurait le saisir sans en fixer la mobilité, ni ₄ l’adapter à sa forme banale sans le faire tomber dans le domaine commun.

  [our perceptions, sensations, emotions, and ideas are presented in two ways: one

clear, precise, but impersonal; the other confused, infinitely mobile, and inexpli-

cable, because language can not seize it without fixing its mobility, nor adapt it to its banal form without watching it fall into the common domain.]

  Bergson was hardly alone in his observations, and this line of investi- gation is by no means limited to speakers of French; as Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1926) wrote in his Letter of Lord Chandos:

  […] the language in which I might be able not only to write but also to think is

[…] a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inani-

mate things speak to me and wherein I may one day justify myself before an _{5 3} unknown judge.

  

Henri Bergson, Œuvres, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,

₄ 1959), 109. Translations are mine unless indication to the contrary. ₅ Bergson 85-86.

  

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Letter of Lord Chandos,” Selected Prose, trans. Mary

  

Introduction

  11 The poets who followed Romanticism thus inherited a poetic tradi-

  tion in which the role of the lyric subject and its language were questioned. This avenue of inquiry into what is commonly called the crisis of the lyric subject has been the focus of important critical

  6

  studies in recent years. As Dominique Rabaté has explained, the lyric subject is a constant source of tension, stuck in a state of flux and slipping back and forth between the “je” in the poet’s mind – repre- sented on the page – and the “je” as it is received by the reader:

  Cette tension, qui ne se résout pas en une dialectique, fait ainsi porter l’accent sur l’instabilité de ce sujet: le sujet lyrique en question, c’est-à-dire ce sujet comme question, comme inquiétude, comme force de déplacement. Le sujet lyrique n’est donc pas à entendre comme un donné qui s’exprime selon un certain langage, la ₇ langue changée en chant, mais comme un procès, une quête d’identité.

  [This tension, which is not resolved in a dialectic, thus puts the emphasis on the instability of this subject, the lyric subject in question, that is to say this subject as question, as worry, as force of displacement. The lyric subject should thus not be understood as a given expressed according to a certain language, a language changed into chant, but as a process, a search for identity.]

  Rather than trace the path of this tension throughout nineteenth- century French poetry, studies of the crisis of the lyric consider not only language’s inherent shortcomings but also the impact of those limitations on the stability of the lyric subject. It is useful to discuss just a few of these semiotic approaches for, while they are not the central focus of this study, they do inform our understanding of the complexity of the poetic subject’s expression in and through language. For Julia Kristeva, the lyric subject becomes “un individu éclaté, passage à la limite du moi: à la limite de la synthèse logico- syntaxique” [an exploded individual, a passage to the limits of self: to

  8 ₆ the limits of logic-syntactic synthesis].

  

See Dominique Rabaté, ed. Figures du sujet lyrique; Dominique Rabaté, Joëlle de

Sermet, and Yves Vadé, eds. Modernités 8: Le sujet lyrique en question; and Nathalie

Watteyne, ed., Lyrisme et énonciation lyrique (see bibliography for complete

₇ information).

  

Dominique Rabaté, “Énonciation poétique, énonciation lyrique,” Figures du sujet

lyrique , ed. Rabaté (Paris: Presses universitaires de France / “Perspectives littéraires,”

₈ 1996), 66; original emphasis.

  12 Leaving Parnassus

  This tug of war between the poetic subject and its language is particularly prominent in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century, as Julia Kristeva explains: “[…] la transformation du langage poétique à la fin du XIXe siècle consiste précisément en ce qu’il devient une pratique [d’une] dialectique du sujet dans le lan- gage” [the transformation of poetic language at the end of the nineteenth century consists precisely in that it becomes a practice of a

  9

  dialectic of the subject in language]. Kristeva’s reflections on poetic language, while directed more at symbolist poetry, interest the present study because they are just as applicable to certain aspects of Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s poetic projects. In the opposition between what she refers to as the symbolic and the semiotic, Kristeva defines two fields of expression: the first, representing everyday transparent linguistic expression which is of the order of the sign; the second is a poetic expression that surpasses the limits of the former and destabilizes language’s referential function. It is precisely language’s destabilizing potential that will interest us in this study; the poet troubles the existing order in exploiting in a new way the discursive

  10 figures that go beyond everyday language.

  Another useful approach to language comes from Henri Meschonnic, for whom the practices of signifying are as important as the signification itself (if not more so). Like Kristeva, he privileges aspects of language that are beyond the realm of the sign, and he gives particular emphasis to rhythm: “le primat du rythme, dans la signi- fiance, avec tout ce qu’elle comporte d’infralinguistic, de transsémiotique (débordant le signe), il me semble que ce sont ces ₉ éléments qui font la relation spécifique du rythme au poème” [the ₁₀ Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 81.

  

While Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic is useful in a discussion of post-romantic

poetry because it goes beyond transparent signification, there is an important

distinction between her approach and the one undertaken in this study: the anteriority

of the semiotic vis-à-vis the symbolic. For Kristeva, the semiotic resides in a maternal

space of free expression, existing before the entrance into paternal language, through

which all expressions are forever mediated (and are thus manipulated). While her

theory is certainly interesting in its capacity to create a space of expression outside the

dominant forces of the symbolic, this study distances itself from the notion of an

anterior “first” language, since such an approach emphasizes the psychological and

brings into play other aspects – including the origins of expression – that are too

  

Introduction

  13

  primacy of rhythm, in significance, with everything infralinguistic and transsemiotic (going beyond the sign) that it brings with it, it seems to me that these are the elements that make the specific relationship from

  11

  rhythm to the poem]. It is precisely in the rhythm of a poem, what Meschonnic defines as “mouvement de la parole, mouvement du sujet dan son langage” [movement of speech, movement of the subject in

  12

  its language] , that we can find poetry’s specificity. However, instead of limiting rhythm to versification, Meschonnic goes further, consid- ering rhythm as an integral part of all literature, linking meaning and form in all kinds of linguistic expression. Of course, rhythm remains a key element of poetry because it is “ce qu’il y a du plus inaudible dans le règne du sens” [that which is the most inaudible in the reign of

  13

  meaning] and because it retains the link between the lyric and its oral tradition, central to Meschonnic’s writings.

  Informed by these approaches to the crisis of the lyric subject in nineteenth-century French poetry, this study focuses on that crisis as it is played out, and as can be organized along thematic lines, in the works of two poets of the second half of the century: Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Both poets react to Parnassian poetry, “ce culte

  14

  de la rime riche” [this cult of rich rhyme] , a consensus of poetic approaches that grew out of the publication of the three volumes of Le

  

parnasse contemporain . While Parnassian poetry was “un groupement

  jeune, l’expression d’une génération nouvelle” [a young grouping, the

  

15

  expression of a new generation] , it was marked by a return to classical prosodic forms and in general a heightened respect for the rules that govern them:

  Ce souci esthétique qui caractérise le Parnasse, se manifeste chez les nouveaux venus par un respect accru des ‘règles’ prosodiques et par un retour à des formes fixes qu’avaient abandonnées ou méprisées les romantiques, exceptés quelques _{16 11} ‘marginaux’ comme Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Nerval. ₁₂ Meschonnic, “Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?” Langue française 56 (Dec. 1982), 10. ₁₃ Meschonnic, “Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?” 20. ₁₄ Meschonnic, La rime et la vie (Paris: Verdier, 1989), 20-21. _rd

Pierre Martino, Parnasse et symbolisme (1850-1900), 3 ed. (Paris: Armand Colin,

₁₅ 1930), 27.

  

Luc Decaunes, ed. La poésie parnassienne: De Gautier à Rimbaud (Paris: Seghers,

₁₆ 1977), 7.

  

Decaunes 14; see Chapter One of this study for a more involved discussion of the

  14 Leaving Parnassus [The aesthetic concern that characterized le Parnasse manifested itself in the works of the new arrivals in a heightened respect for prosodic “rules” and by a return to the fixed forms that the Romantics – with the exception of a few “marginals” like Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Nerval – had abandoned or despised.]

  For both Verlaine and Rimbaud, the destabilized situation of the lyric subject is a direct response to and reaction against the traditional modes of subject/object relations that characterized Parnassian poetry.

  This study’s three parts pursue the lines of questioning opened here. The first chapter, “The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry,” examines how Parnassian poetry was a direct refutation of the Romantic notion of the social utility of poetry as seen in Alphonse de Lamartine’s poems. In stating that “tout ce qui est utile est laid” [“all

  17

  that is useful is ugly”] , Théophile Gautier helped develop the Parnassian credo of l’art pour l’art [“art for art’s sake”] which considered the depiction of beauty in its many forms as the only valid aesthetic. Most studies of literary history give Parnassian poetry short shrift, especially once the advent of Symbolism arrived in 1886.

  However, this first chapter shows that, while Parnassian poetry has perhaps lost favor among twentieth-century scholars, it was a much more dominant presence than most scholars have traditionally accepted, and poets throughout the late 1880s and mid 1890s were still trying to shake the confines of le Parnasse. Even after Symbol- ism’s official manifesto, poets continued to respond to Parnassian poetry of earlier decades, suggesting that its dominant lyric subject enjoyed a long and enduring presence during much of the last forty years of the century. As a result, many poets of the 1860s and 1870s wrote in the shadow of this Mount Parnassus. For some, like the two studied here, their departure from Parnassian poetry marked the first step in a direction that would prove to be a fundamental aspect of their ₁₇ poetics, spanning their entire work. In this regard, the influence of

  

Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Adolphe Boschot (Paris:

Classiques Garnier, 1955), 23. “Most scholars agree that the first reference to l’art

pour l’art is in a work by the philosopher Victor Cousin, Questions esthétiques et

  (1818), in which he says that art is not enrolled in the service of religion religieuses

and morals or in the service of what is pleasing and useful” (Wallace Fowlie, Poem

and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism [University Park, PA: Pennsylva-

  

Introduction

  15 Parnassian poetry on Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s poems can hardly be overstated.

  “Verlaine’s Identities” shows the extent to which Verlaine’s poetry is based on a constantly evolving search for poetic subjectivity. In each collection, the search is redefined, and the lyric subject adopts a new role to play, each time framed within the context of a couple. After his Parnassian phase of the 1860s, he turns to writing the love struck subject addressing his beloved in Fêtes galantes and in La

  

Bonne Chanson . No longer under the influence of Saturn as he was in

  his collection Poèmes saturniens, Verlaine’s poems in Romances sans

  

paroles are greatly influenced by the Rimbaud’s poetry, and his poetic

  subject is on the brink of collapse. The devout and reborn poet of

  

Sagesse is in constant conversation with God, only to lead to the

  debauched subject of Verlaine’s final erotic collections, which explore the imaginable relationships of power and positions through the blurring of roles in sexual and poetic role-playing. Here, Verlaine’s subject’s search for self – what Arnaud Bernadet has termed

  18 Verlaine’s “theater of individuality” – is not biographical but rather

  an aesthetic stance that is repeated, with slight variations, during each phase of Verlaine’s literary production. The tensions surrounding the lyric subject do not reflect Verlaine’s biography but are a poetic construct. A clear break from the tradition of Verlaine studies that has far too often muddied the boundaries between life and work not only permits his poems to be studied more seriously, without the hindrance of irrelevant biography, but also forges a clear and promising path for future studies into the role of the lyric subject in Verlaine’s poetry.

  The third part, entitled “Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space,” takes as its point of departure a famous passage from Rimbaud’s correspon- dence, in which he states that the poet arrives at the unknown by “le dérèglement de tous les sens” [the derangement of all the senses]. Here the French word “sens” is interpreted in all its myriad possibili- ties: senses, meanings, and directions, all definitions proposed by dictionaries of the period. In order to question lyric poetry as repre- sented by the Parnassian model, Rimbaud explodes not only the lyric subject’s categories of sensory perception but also the very markers ₁₈ that define the subject’s existence: namely, time and space. Subjectiv-

  

Arnaud Bernadet, “‘Être poète lyrique et vivre de son état’: Fragments d’une

16 Leaving Parnassus

  ity is inextricably linked to the its temporal and spatial situation, and Emile Benveniste saw this link as manifesting itself in language as well:

  Il est aisé de voir que le domaine de la subjectivité s’agrandit encore et doit s’annexer l’expression de la temporalité. Quel que soit le type de langue, on ₁₉

constate partout une certaine organisation linguistique de la notion de temps.

  [It is easy to see that the domain of subjectivity grows greater still and must in- clude the expression of temporality. In whatever kind of language it might be, we see that everywhere there is a certain linguistic organization of the notion of time.]

  By troubling conventional notions of time, Rimbaud destabilizes human existence, always situated somewhere along the axis of time from the very onset of the cogito. When neat categories of past, present, and future become blurred, and history is no longer linear, how do we situate our stories? How do we situate ourselves? Such are the questions raised by Rimbaud’s refusal of a traditional and linear chronology. Readings of poems throughout his brief career situate several existing critical studies of Rimbaud’s bending of time in

20 Illuminations within a larger context and show how the crisis of the

  lyric subject that dominates French poetry of the second half of the century can be traced along the axes of time and space.

  This study concludes by considering how the lyric subject in crisis in the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine is different from that of their Symbolist contemporaries, and how these issues of subjectivity influence the reception of their work by future generations of critics and scholars. While many other poets were able to break free from the Parnassian mold, it continued to define the developing Symbolist movement throughout the 1880s and 1890s, and as such it deserves more attention from critics for the major role it played in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century.

  19 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale. Vol. 1 (Paris: ₂₀ Gallimard / Tel, 1966), 262.

  

See for example Gerald Macklin, “The Reinvention of Time and Space in

  

Chapter One

The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

  Before considering the situation of Parnassian poetry – and perhaps its underestimated dominance – it is useful to recall the basic origins and themes for which le Parnasse came to be known. As the words

  

Parnasse and Parnassus suggest, the poetry grouped into the three

  volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain: recueil de vers nouveaux inhabited Mount Parnassus, mythological home of the Muses and, more generally, of poetry. With this return to mythology came a neoclassical turn away from their own era: roughly 1860 to 1880. They similarly rejected the social utility of poetry that had come to characterize the 1830s and that had perhaps seen its symbolic apotheosis in 1848, when Romantic sensation Alphonse de Lamartine ascended to the head of the provisional government:

  The overwhelming majority of writers in the 1830s and 1840s either endorsed and campaigned tirelessly in behalf of the various ideological aspirations of what became known as social Romanticism or quietly consented to the practice of ₂₁

popular literature for the sake of swift personal recognition and financial gain.

  In the preface to his 1835 Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier refuted poetry’s potential for social utility. Five years earlier, on 25 February 1830, Gautier had famously worn a red vest in support of his fellow Romantics and their ideals at the première of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, thus casting himself as a major player in the “bataille d’Hernani” [battle of Hernani]. Hugo’s preface to Hernani broke French theater’s reliance on tenets from the classical age; ₂₁ Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin marked a similar

  

Robert F. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets (Carbondale, IL: Southern

  18 Leaving Parnassus

  departure from an earlier model, and his anti-utility stance has been paraphrased as l’art pour l’art ever since.

  Of course, the relative proximity (just five years) of these two im- portant events, and Gautier’s involvement in each, shows the extent to which Romanticism and le Parnasse are closely aligned on some levels and yet significantly opposed on others. Indeed, “[…] opinions to this day are divided between a view of le Parnasse as a continua-

  22

  tion of Romanticism and as a reaction against it.” This complexity comes precisely from le Parnasse’s rich diversity and its lack of

  23

  cohesion. Never a clearly-defined literary movement or school as were Romanticism and, later, Symbolism (with its official manifesto), the Parnassian phenomenon was more a assemblage of poets whose work shared, to varying degrees, some common approaches to poetic

  24

  content or form. In his landmark 1903 history of French poetry of the last third of the nineteenth century, former Parnassian Catulle Mendès reflected on the lack of cohesion in this way:

  

Il n’y eut jamais, je le répète, ni dans l’intention, ni dans le fait, d’école parnas-

sienne; nous n’avions rien de commun, sinon la jeunesse de l’espoir, la haine du débraillé poétique et la chimère de la beauté parfaite. Et cette beauté, chacun de nous la conçut selon son personnel idéal. Je ne pense pas qu’à aucune époque d’aucune littérature, des poètes du même moment aient été à la fois plus unis de

cœur et plus différents par l’idée et par l’expression […] Au contraire, il se pro-

₂₂ duisit entre ceux qu’on appelle encore parnassiens […] une extraordinaire

Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-

Century French Poetry . Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 17 (West Lafayette,

  

IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), 84. For more on the numerous critical points of

view, see Schultz, Gendered Lyric 287n2. Critics such as Schultz and Metzidakis

have revisited this question, with the former concluding that le Parnasse is “[. . .] a

rejection of Romanticism's perceived femininity and an attempt to reclaim poetry as a

masculine domain” (Gendered Lyric 84). See Schultz’s “Part 2: Parnassian Impassiv-

ity and Frozen Femininity,” 81-167 in Gendered Lyric. ₂₃ In his exhaustive study of this generation of poets, Luc Badesco details the origins

of this nebulous assemblage, tracing the “quatre groupes distincts” [four distinct

groups] that, together, made up much of the Parnassian group. See Luc Badesco, La

, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions A.-G. génération poétique de 1860. La jeunesse des deux rives

Nizet, 1971), 1:320. Other useful studies on the composition of the Parnassian group

are Catulle Mendès, La légende du Parnasse contemporain (Brussels: August E.

₂₄ Brancart, 1884) and Robert F. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets.

  

“The one hundred poets represented in the anthologies are more urgently united in

the solidarity of their artistic endeavor than they are in any specifically rigid attitude

  

The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

  19 divergence d’inspiration, et leur œuvre qu’on incline à présenter comme collective ₂₅ est, au contraire, infiniment éparse et diverse. [There was never, I repeat, neither in intention nor in fact, a Parnassian school; we had nothing in common, except for a youthful hope, a hatred for poetic untidiness and the chimera of perfect beauty. And this beauty, each of us conceived of it according to his personal ideal. I do not think that at any epoch in any literature, poets of the same moment had been at once more united in spirit and more differ- ent in idea and expression […] On the contrary, there was among those that are still called Parnassian […] an extraordinary divergence of inspiration, and their work that we tend to present as collective is, on the contrary, infinitely dispersed and diverse.]

  The collection’s very subtitle – “Recueil de vers nouveaux” [Collection of new verses] – bespeaks a loose assemblage more than a collection of poems built around a specific poetic or philosophical

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  approach, as Luc Badesco has argued. And yet, despite what Mendès calls their “extraordinaire divergence,” Parnassian poets did share certain undeniable traits; with their return to Parnassus in name came a turn to the past – le Parnasse is certainly a neoclassical movement – but once again in a slight deviation from the Romantics’ take on that same past: “Romantisme français et Parnasse se tournent également vers le passé, mais avec cela de différent, que le premier y voit des exemples à suivre dans l’avenir et pour l’avenir, et le second trouve là les temps d’harmonie qui sont définitivement passés” [French Romanticism and le Parnasse turned toward the past, but with this difference: that the former saw examples to follow in the future and

  

for the future, and the latter found moments of harmony, gone

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  forever]. In the preface to his Poëmes et Poésies (1855), Leconte de Lisle defended his neoclassical stance as an anti-modernity, stating

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  “Je hais mon temps” [I hate my time period]. He argued against ₂₅ steam and electric telegraph, the most visible of the modern scenes

  

Catulle Mendès, Le mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900 (Paris:

₂₆ Imprimerie Nationale / E. Fasquelle, 1903), 114.

  

Luc Badesco, La Génération poétique de 1860. La jeunesse des deux rives. 2 vols

₂₇ (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1971), 2:1305.

  

László Bárdos, “L’esthétique du Parnasse: l’art et l’artiste dans la conception de

₂₈ Leconte de Lisle,” Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 20 (1978), 328.

  

Charles Leconte de Lisle, Articles, préfaces, discours, ed. Edgard Pich (Paris:

  20 Leaving Parnassus

  that inspired so much of impressionist painting, that movement that captured so well its present day:

  J’ai beau tourner les yeux vers le passé, je ne l’aperçois qu’à travers la fumée de la houille, condensée en nuées épaisses dans le ciel; j’ai beau tendre l’oreille aux premiers chants de la poésie humaine, les seuls qui méritent d’être écoutés, je les entends à peine, grâce aux clameurs barbares du Pandémonium industriel. […] Les hymnes et les odes inspirées par la vapeur et la télégraphie électrique m’émeuvent médiocrement, et toutes ces périphrases didactiques, n’ayant rien de commun avec l’art, me démontreraient plutôt que les poètes deviennent d’heure ₂₉ en heure plus inutiles aux sociétés modernes.

  [Now matter how much I turn my eyes to the past, I can see it only through the coal smoke, condensed in thick clouds in the sky. No matter how much I open my ear to the first chants of human poetry, the only ones that deserve to be heard; I can hardly hear them, thanks to the barbaric clamor of industrial Pandemonium. […] the hymns and odes inspired by steam and the electric telegraph move me only slightly, and all these didactic periphrases, having nothing in common with art, show me instead that poets are becoming, with each passing hour, more and more useless in modern society.]

  Leconte de Lisle’s hatred of the modernity that surrounded him – “Haine inoffensive, malheureusement, et qui n’attriste que moi”

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  [Inoffensive hatred, unfortunately, that saddens only myself] – was expressed partly in response to the reviews of his 1852 collection

  

Poëmes antiques , in the preface to which he had written: “Les émo-

  tions personnelles n’y ont laissé que peu de traces; les passions et les faits contemporains n’y apparaissent point” [Personal emotions left but few traces; passions and contemporary events do not appear at all]. As is equally evident in the title of 1862 collection Poésies

  

barbares (expanded for an 1872 edition with a similar title, Poëmes

barbares ), Leconte de Lisle’s work led the Parnassian call for a return

  away from the modern civilizations towards antiquity, away from the trappings of nineteenth-century French society towards an earlier, mythological, barbaric past. Parnassian preference for a pre-modern moment is a refusal of rapidity of its changes, its ephemeral nature; as Gautier explained in “L’Art”:

  29 ₃₀ Leconte de Lisle 126-27.

  

The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry

  21 Tout passe. — L’art robuste Seul à l’éternité.

  Le buste ₃₁ Survit à la cité.

  [Everything passes. — Robust art Alone is eternal.

  The bust Outlives the city.]

  Only beauty and art can stand the test of time, as classical master- pieces show; it is from this point that the Parnassian preference for statues developed: works of art that are nearly impervious to age:

  Oui, l’œuvre sort plus belle D’une forme au travail Rebelle, ₃₂ Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.

  [Indeed, the results of art are more beautiful When they emerge from a substance Rebellious to modeling, Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.]

  French verse is hardly as resilient as marble, onyx, and enamel, but Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852) made a strong case – strong enough to warrant the author’s poems appearing first in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain.

  The Parnassians’ repudiations of certain Romantic tenets did not translate into a similar refutation of all Romantic poets; Victor Hugo remained a dominant and largely revered presence until his death in 1885 (despite – or, rather, in part because of – his exile during the Second Empire). In fact, Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) paved the way

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  for Parnassian poets’ formal experimentation. Their neoclassicism ₃₁ also permitted the Parnassians to draw often from mythology and

  

Gautier, Émaux et camées, ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Gallimard/Poésie,

1981), 149. For a more detailed analysis of this poem, see Peter Whyte, “‘L’art’ de

Gautier: Genèse et sens,” 119-39 in Relire Théophile Gautier: Le plaisir du texte, ed.

Freeman G. Henry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); thanks to Stamos Metzidakis for