Poetry to Surrealism

French Literature

Course 1 · Chapter 8 · Poetry to Surrealism

While the novelists of the nineteenth century described society, a series of French poets did something stranger: they set out to change what poetry was. In about seventy years the art moved from rhymed regular verse to free verse, from description to suggestion, from sense to dream. The poets themselves were often scandalous, poor or short-lived, and their influence was out of proportion to their numbers. This chapter follows that line from Baudelaire, through the Symbolists, to the Surrealists. Poetry loses a great deal in translation, so the chapter describes the poets and their ideas and quotes almost nothing. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821 to 1867) published his collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857 (check). It deals with beauty and decay, desire and boredom, and the modern city of Paris. The poems were prosecuted for offending public morals, in the same year as the trial of Madame Bovary (Chapter 7), and the poet was fined and had to remove six poems (check the details). The ban on those poems was formally lifted in the twentieth century (check the date). Baudelaire also wrote prose poems, art criticism and essays on modern life, in which he described the figure of the flâneur, the idle stroller who observes the city (check). He is often called the first modern poet.

Verlaine and Rimbaud

Paul Verlaine (1844 to 1896)

A poet of musical, melancholy verse, much set to music, including by Fauré and Debussy (check; see French Music 4). His life was unsettled by drink and by his turbulent relationship with Rimbaud.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854 to 1891)

A teenage prodigy who wrote his major poetry in a few years, including Le Bateau ivre (1871) and the prose-poem sequence Une saison en enfer (1873), and who stopped writing before he was twenty-one (check the dates).

Their quarrel

In 1873, in Brussels, Verlaine shot and wounded Rimbaud during a quarrel and was sentenced to two years in prison (check the details).

After poetry

Rimbaud left Europe and worked as a trader in East Africa, and died in Marseille after an illness (check).

The poet as visionary In letters of 1871, Rimbaud described the poet as a seer who must make himself so through a long, deliberate disordering of the senses, and wrote that "I" is someone else (check the wording of the letters). These statements were later seen as a charter for modern poetry: the self is not given but made, and the poet's job is not to describe but to see differently. Whatever one thinks of the method, the idea shaped every poetic movement that followed.

Mallarmé and Symbolism

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 to 1898), a schoolteacher by profession, led the Symbolist movement, which held that poetry should suggest rather than state (check). His verse is dense, elliptical and often very hard to read, even for French speakers. His long poem Un coup de dés (1897), laid out across the page with varying type and large white spaces, is regarded as a forerunner of experimental poetry (check the date). Mallarmé gathered writers and artists at his Tuesday evening gatherings in Paris (check). His poem about a faun inspired Debussy's orchestral prelude, discussed in French Music 4 (check).

Apollinaire and Surrealism

Writer	Work	Note
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 to 1918)	Alcools (1913), Calligrammes (1918)	Dropped punctuation, wrote poems shaped like objects on the page; credited with coining the word "surrealism" in 1917 (check); died of influenza in 1918 after being wounded in the war (check)
André Breton (1896 to 1966)	Manifeste du surréalisme (1924)	Leader of the Surrealist group; defined the movement as pure psychic automatism (check the wording)
Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and others	Poetry and prose	Surrealist writers who later followed varied political paths (check)

The Surrealists believed that logic and convention had stifled the imagination, and they looked to dreams, chance and the unconscious as sources. One method they used was automatic writing, in which the writer sets words down rapidly without censoring them (check the description). Surrealism was a movement of painters and film-makers as well as writers, and it had effects far beyond Paris. Its poetry ranges from the playful to the political, and its reputation has risen and fallen over the decades.

Reading poetry in translation Poetry is the hardest form to translate, and the poets in this chapter depend heavily on sound. Use a dual-language edition, read the French aloud even if you cannot understand every word, and compare more than one translation. A short poem read three times is better than a long one skimmed.

Check the details The lives of Verlaine and Rimbaud are surrounded by anecdotes, and dates of publication for the collections vary between editions. The lifting of the Baudelaire ban, the coining of "surrealism" and Breton's definition are also worth confirming in a reliable reference work.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain why Baudelaire is called the first modern poet and what happened to Les Fleurs du mal in 1857.

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Exercise 2

Describe the idea of the poet as seer in Rimbaud's letters of 1871 and say why it mattered for later movements.

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Exercise 3

Compare Symbolism and Surrealism: what did each believe poetry should do, and how did their methods differ?

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Quick Reference

Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal (1857); trial; the flâneur
Verlaine and Rimbaud: musical verse; the teenage prodigy; the 1873 shooting
Mallarmé: Symbolism; suggestion over statement; Un coup de dés
Apollinaire: Alcools, Calligrammes; the word "surrealism"
Breton: the 1924 manifesto; automatic writing
Check: publication dates, the lifting of the ban, Breton's definition

Next chapter: Proust, Existentialism & After, which covers Proust, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir and the Nouveau Roman.