Baudelaire and Symbolist Poetry

Symbolist poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine took the view that a poem was a self-expressive gesture - self-sufficient and self-justifying. It did not refer to anything outside of itself, was not really `about' anything but its status as language and its expressive potential. One way of making poetry more expressive lay in the exploitation of language's musical properties. It is no surprise then, that the ideal of Symbolist poetry was music. Poets should cultivate the `music' of poetry - the delicate harmonies and subtle dissonances and assonances of vowels and of consonants. Paul Verlaine was particularly successful in cultivating the `music' of poetry in this first sense in such works as Poèmes saturniens (1866), Fêtes galantes (1869) and Romances sans paroles (1874). The first impression the reader receives upon first reading a Verlaine poem is not of meaning but of words arranged in subtle and elaborate harmonies as in the following example:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons

De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.


Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand


Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens

Et je pleure;


Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais


Qui m'emporte
Deça, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.


`Chanson d'automne' in Romances sans paroles

The second idea is that poetry should have the power to evoke complex states of feeling in much the same way as music. Feeling and thought should be present in such a way as prevented the reader from defining precisely what those feelings or thoughts are. Poetry should be like music insofar as its meanings are undefinable or untranslatable, a point Mallarmé makes in one of his poems:

Le sens trop précis rature
Ta vague littérature


`Toute l'âme resumée' in Poésies

Further Reading

• G. Chesters, Baudelaire and the Poetics of Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

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Les Chemins du savoir
Concept: Charlie Mansfield, Text: Tony McNeill, Artwork: Carole Baker
The University of Sunderland, GB, Last Update 18-Mar-96