The French Symbolists
the context of late Romanticism and the first modern wars | Baudelaire | Rimbaud | For further reading
The French Symbolist movement grew out
of an age of disillusion in the late nineteenth century. It also followed an
age of Romanticism that seemed to have taken artists into a kind of an exile
in imagination. But this was also the period when Bismarck invented the blitzkrief
[“lightning warfare”] and brought France into its first modern war.
The Symbolists were rebels just as their predecessors the Romantics
were, but the Romantics were champions of feeling over reason—heart over
head . The Symbolists sought values that would counteract the pervasive materialism
of their culture; they wanted to reject the world, the reading public, and any
obligations to society. They sought a more true individuality even if that meant
being against reality itself. They dealt with language as a mystical tool to
seek absolute essences, which was ironic in an age that proclaimed God dead.
For them, introspection was not mere escapism; it was a sensitive measuring
instrument of external forces. A pure language of poetry could divine archetype
and essence in realities as they exist for all people. Exploring the infancy
of one individual could yield the infancy of the race, and retelling myths could
describe the collective unconscious.
Though the Symbolists inadvertently discovered the universal
language of the subconscious, they did not have the inclination or the inspiration
to transcend themselves and take the steps toward a literature based on an existentialist
awareness of life in a post-God and post-absolute universe. (That would have
to wait until the twentieth century.) But they started the crucial questions
of modern literature— they first explored the condition of poetry itself
and the human condition in the modern world.
Like any successful revolution, Symbolists took hold where their
predecessors’ were weakening by losing contact with reality. Late Romanticism
had to bear “le mal du siècle,” i.e. the awareness of the
death of God combined with an awareness of the need for the divine. Romanticism
could not really affirm God’s existence, so it was taken for granted.
Art for art’s sake predominated, and bourgeois maxims were widely espoused.
As the nineteenth century wore on, the Romantic “heart” had to accommodate
the social sciences and their vague promises of progress toward a better world.
(Glorious democracies would some day make better lives for the squalid working
class.) The “Romantic individual” and the “Romantic heart”
were no longer tenable— they were not authentic as they tried to straddle
old spiritualism and modern times. The romantic ego was no longer truly subjective—
it was gilded with ideals of beauty and inflated with demagogic feelings.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1871 was a demoralizing catastrophe for France. But as often happens when a civilization is forced to embrace the harshness of its historical moment, there were poets and artists who were able to express what had been repressed so long. Analogously, when World War I had a demoralizing, catastrophic impact on the culture of all of Europe, the modernists were able to say aloud in “high culture” much that had never been permitted before. Disillusion had, after all, some liberating effects.
Baudelaire | "Correspondances"
Charles Baudelaire was hailed by the younger poet Arthir Rimbaud as the first visionary ("le premier voyant") and the king of poets ("le roi des poètes"), but he began as a late Romantic who translated Edgar Allen Poe into French. Baudelaire recognized the power of Poe's indefiniteness of music, which gave a spiritual effect. He too sought incantatory power in his poetry. He was an early discoverer of the music of Richard Wagner and he also recognized before many others Manet's genius in painting. Baudelaire is one of the reasons why in Symbolist poetry, it has been said that they made music or musicality the goal of poetry. In his famous sonnet "Correspondances" he broke away from anything done before and inadvertently began a "poetry of essence," a poetry that suggests much about the essence of art and man and the universality of humankind. At the same time, in other works he contributed to the school of decadence with his great ability to evoke sensations. He also took a bold anti-religious stance to express his pessimism in an age without God. Baudelaire also influenced the aesthetic school, those who were more interested in an almost priest-like role for the poet as though poets could unlock the secrets to reality. They especially hailed "Correspondances."
"Correspondances" has a number of philosophical ideas in its structure. The first quatrain says that the world is intelligible to the seer, or the visionary poet ("poète voyant"), who has the key to unlock the correspondences. His task is to find appropriate symbols for the hidden analogies of "Nature." The second quatrain affirms the confusion of the senses, or "synesthesia," and says that all sense-data may be correlated. The tercets give examples of correspondence and synesthesia. In a letter, Baudelaire wrote that the poet's intelligence was the most sovereign, and that imagination was the most scientific and universal of faculties because imagination is what can understand the way things "correspond" in a mystic sense. Thus, the seer or visionary poet applies his intellect and synthesizes the sensual, emotional and spiritual into a greater art. The "symbol" is the revelation of a concealed collective or mythical archetype.
Baudelaire himself did not try to follow this higher vision to a greater plane of wisdom. In fact, he tried to throw himself into Satanism and a splenetic reaction to the "death of God." Baudelaire was not inspired to find a way to make the "death of God" bearable in a new, transcendent way. But by searching for a power as necessary as God's, he was asserting the necessity of something like faith. Opium, alcohol, hasish, sex and witchcraft may have been instruments to Baudelaire to see and feel new sensations. These things also made him one of the first truly great poets of the modern city in a way that still shapes how we think of "the city."
Paul Verlaine, one of the most popular of the Symbolists, credited Baudelaire with "whatever is deepest" in his work. Mallarmé, the most famous symbolist in the "aesthetic" school, was also indebted to Baudelaire for bringing poems from a "hidden life" of the spirit that is alien to logic. Baudelaire gave to the "decadent" school the guttural sensations of Paris with all its brothels, pimps, vice and misery, but he did this with a purpose and a heroic stance:
"Tu m'as donnée ta boue et j'en ai fait de l'or"
('You gave me your mud and I made gold from it.')
The greatest debt to Baudelaire, however, happened to be in the case of the youngest of his followers, Arthur Rimbaud.
As a fifteen-year-old poet, Rimbaud once wrote to one of the editors of a late Romantic publication, Parnasse Contemporain, and he said that he loved all poets, and the poet is in love with ideal beauty... The late Romantic mode of ideal beauty, however, made something sexless and ethereal out of women. A few years later, Rimbaud would repudiate these lifeless ideals. He embraced Baudelaire's poem about hashish, which illuminated new senses and "correspondences," and formed his own visionary theory. The hashish poem proclaimed the realm of hidden order and "correspondences" as results of extreme sensation. Poetry could have spiritual power when the intelligence was illuminated through intoxication, and the music of poetry would speak the true poem of one's life. Poetry, as Rimbaud misread Baudelaire, meant a key to the unknown and the eternal.
Rimbaud sought vice for specific ends; he did not resort to vice in despair. He did not realize that Baudelaire himself felt a personal horror at his own need for vice; Baudelaire's attitude as a person was remorseful. He was "heroic" only insofar as he was able to face his fallen condition without resorting to the comforts of bourgeois faith. Rimbaud's story became one of the most poignant of all poets' because of how he read and misread Baudelaire. Rimbaud thought the poet who was a visionary could be exempt from the concept of sin. He decided the poet was the instrument of the eternal voice, the fiddle that the gods play.
Rimbaud's theory of the seer or visionary was that derangement of the senses, the sundering of his soul and self with drugs, alcohol, and deparavity would prepare him like broken ground for seeds of the eternal to flower. Debauchery was a necessary aesthetic and spiritual discipline. He did not enjoy it; it was more like martyrdom for him. In a way, Baudelaire had set the stage for the younger poet's "heroics." While Baudelaire found gold in the mud of Paris' worst, Rimbaud became the worst. While Baudelaire vented his "spleen" and found himself above the fake bourgeoisie, Rimbaud hurled himself beneath them. While Baudelaire espoused blasphemy, Rimbaud embodied it. While Baudelaire had a tremendously strong character, that strength was expressed mostly in his ability to suffer. Rimbaud was able to create a new kind of "individual" in poetry, not the conscious self but an "other" self that was more like an absolute. "Je est un autre," ("I is another"), he wrote. He was not the source of the poetry but the one who watched it being born. "J'assiste a l'éclosion de m'a pensée: je la regarde, je l'écoute." He believed the familiar self was a fiction, a construction to meet the demands of society and materialistic culture. He responded to a hieratic calling, the poet who, as in the civilization of the Ancient Greeks, acted as the essential translator of myths and spirituality. Despite the seeming extreme subjectivity of Rimbaud's "methods," he encountered the truly larger realm of the subconscious and the collective unconscious, long before that term existed.
Rimbaud's bold experiments would ultimately give the Surrealists in the twentieth century their foundations in the subconscious. He remains even now an enormously influential and popular poet.
The life of Rimbaud is actually extraordinarily poigant and (perhaps) tragic even compared to the lives of other poets; he stopped writing at the age of nineteen or so. He was never accepted or appreciated for his achievements until too late.
If you are really fascinated by the lives and works of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and you are looking for a short but very profound critical response, I think that one of the best books is called Exploding Poetry: Baudelaire/Rimbaud by Georges Poulet (U Chicago Press, 1984). A founder of the Geneva School of criticism, Poulet was a giant in Europe and America who returned to study Baudelaire and Rimbaud throughout his career. Therefore, his understanding of both poets is really extraordinarily productive, provocative and concise. In this book, Poulet shows not how Baudelaire and Rimbaud resembled each other but how utterly distinct they were from each other: "[Baudelaire] seeing the hand of fate everywhere, and [Rimbaud] demonstrating in every act the role of creative freedom" (xvii).
You may well ask, but where can I get this book?
It is in our library: PQ431 .P6813 1984
You may also well ask, but if I am a poet/writer, how much do I need to pay attention to critics, even great critics?
Well, the greatest critics always begin with the same love of the writing that the poets and writers begin with. That is why great critics/thinkers sometimes do great things for creative writers, e.g. explain to other people the where, how and why of the greatness of an author. So when poets and writers read great criticism, it can be extraordinarily inspiring even though it is not the "direct" inspiration of reading a great author. It is usually a more abstract process than that.
On the other hand, I have to admit that the vast majority of critics are not truly great or even very good. But another great book about a very different (nicer) Symbolist poet is in our library:
Warren Ramsey, Jules Laforgue, essays on a poet's life and work, ( Southern Illinois University Press, 1969): PQ2323.L8 Z873