Found this little yellow book under a stack of postcards from study in London and Wales; says I bought it at a London bookshop on Gloucester Road in ’99. I had studied various symbolists, like Laforgue and Verlaine, with two mentors. My doctoral advisor Leonard Unger wrote a book on Laforgue, Conrad, and TS Eliot; and a decade later, my postdoctoral seminar with Princeton’s Lipking on comparative lit, focused a couple weeks on symbolist poet-critics like Verlaine.
My marginalia appears throughout Schmidt’s book, especially chapters I, III and V (symbolist theater). Right now, I’m taken by Ch III. The year after Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884), a parody was published by Vicaire and Beauclaire, Complaintes (51). One parody describes a child having to cope with a large chamber pot, forced to fill such a large space, unable to sit on this warm, calm night “de decembre / ce petit cul noyé dans ce grand pot de chambre” (bmlisieux.com: Les Déliquescences, poèmes décadents d'Adoré Floupette).
Since I published my parodies this year (Parodies Lost), including Dylan Thomas, Maya Angelou, and Dickinson, I enjoyed seeing the symbolistes targeted. See my review of Baudelaire, nasty little Charley, who was the worst of humans—see his necrophiliac love poem—but a genuine genius poet.
As for Laforgue, Schmidt explains his shyness, “La poésie lui permet de murmurer à ses confidents dont l’anonymat le rassure les aveux que la timidité l’empȇche de prononcer”(46). But Laforgue was also a ferocious mysogynist, unable to relate to the Eternal Woman he sought, “L’Adversaire n’est pas, pour Laforgue, le bourgeois positiviste, mais la Femme.” But he did have an instinctive aversion which he searched Schopenhauer to explain, “Comme Rousseau, et pour les causes analogues, LaForgue hait la société”(45).
Just as my graduate advisor had emphasized Laforgue’s influence on TS Eliot, my Princeton seminar developed Verlaine’s criticism and verse. Schmidt finds Verlaine a poet-musician, even images moving rhythmically in the subconscious, as in the soul. What art leads one to the flow of interior life? La musique. Poets should arrange words to delight as does music. So Verlaine also structured and judged prosody, his Clair de Lune in its tetrameters, his Romances sans paroles ranging from dimeter to hexameter, though still many tetrameters, even necessitating repeated words for the meter:
“O triste, triste était mon âme / A cause, à cause d'une femme” (“Ariettes Oubliées VII,”Romances sans paroles). The English reader will recall Dryden, too, placed great emphasis on the parallel between poetry and music. ( )