French Symbolists

Introduction

During the first half of the nineteenth century, poetry in France was dominated by Romanticism, which had broken the rules of classicism and had opened the way for freedom of poetic creation. Poetry had become emotive and descriptive; the poet had been recognized as an isolated individual alienated from society by his genius. Materialistic bourgeois society had been rejected by the poets. As the century progressed, French poetry evolved into three main schools or styles—Parnassianism, Decadence, and Symbolism. The Parnassians took as their credo the art-for-art’s-sake theory of poetry by Théophile Gautier, in which form mattered more than idea. Purity of form and emotional detachment permeated the Parnassians’ works, which treated subjects from antiquity or described exotic places. The Decadents exploited the darker traditions of Romanticism and showed a preference for morbid and erotic subjects. The extreme dislike of the bourgeoisie, the pleasure in shocking them, the idea of the poet as alienated from society, and the preoccupation with death were major elements of their poetry. They regularly used opium, hashish, and absinthe to find an inscrutable truth beyond reality. The Symbolists rejected the sentimental effusion of emotion over nature and did not accept this world as the true reality. Their poems expressed states of mind, moods, and sensations, evoking inner experiences and communication with a transcendental other world. The musicality of the verse became an essential element of their poetry. Much of the poetry of the nineteenth century, especially that of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, combined characteristics of Decadence and Symbolism.

Although elements of Symbolism can be found in French poetry as early as the 1850s, the Symbolist movement was not founded until the last decades of the century. On September 18, 1886, Jean Moréas (1856-1910) published the Manifeste dusymbolisme (the Symbolist Manifesto) in Le Figaro. Moréas was actually the first to refer to the poets using symbolism as Symbolists and to a Symbolist movement. The manifesto declared Symbolism to be the major school of French poetry and distinguished Symbolism from Decadence. Because the Decadents treated morbid or erotic subjects in their works and used hallucinatory drugs to achieve states of heightened consciousness, they were considered amoral. Critics and the general public often referred to both Symbolist and Decadent writers as Decadents, and Moréas and his fellow poets wished to avoid being called Decadents, although some of the earlier poets such as Gautier and Baudelaire, whom they admired and whose poetics had strong influences on their work, had taken pride in being considered Decadents. In addition to distinguishing the Symbolists from the Decadents, Moréas defended Symbolism as the superior literary form and severely criticized not only Parnassian poetry but also the realism and naturalism prevalent in the plays and novels of the period.

Symbolism as a literary movement

In 1885, Gabriel Vicaire and Henri Beauclaire published a scathing satire of symbolism, Les Déliquescenses d’Adoré Floupette (the corruption of Adoré Floupette). At first, the satire was viewed by the public as an actual Symbolist work. Then, when the truth was known, the work actually benefited the symbolists as it stimulated the public’s interest in their work. Several journals and reviews devoted to Symbolism were founded during the late 1880s. Gustave Kahn published La Vogue; he was the first to publish the works of Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. Kahn, Paul Adam, and Moréas founded Le Symboliste. In 1889, Alfred Valette and his wife, Marguerite Eymery (known as Rachilde), founded Symbolism’s most important journal, Le Mercure de France. They also held a salon where the Symbolists gathered to discuss their poetry and literary theory. While Mallarmé never presented himself as the leader of the Symbolist Movement, he is often considered as such because of the mardis (Tuesdays) when he hosted writers for literary discussions. He also acted as a mentor to several young writers. One of these younger poets was Paul Valéry, who carried Symbolism into the twentieth century with his poems La Jeune Parque (1917; The Youngest of the Fates, 1947; also known as The Young Fate) and “Le Cimetière marin” (1920; “The Graveyard by the Sea”).

The Symbolist movement peaked from 1886 to 1892 and was largely over by 1905. Among the Symbolists were anarchists or supporters of the anarchist cause. When the anarchists adopted violent tactics (an anarchist threw a bomb into the French chamber of deputies in 1893), the popularity of the Symbolists suffered. After the turn of the century, Symbolism had become the established literary form against which new young writers were reacting, pushing its limits further, such as in Surrealism or returning to older forms.

The poets and their doctrine

The major poets involved in the movement were Moréas, Kahn (who wrote free verse), Henri Régnier, Jules Laforgue, Emile Verharen, and René Ghil (who wrote purely Symbolist poetry). In 1891, however, Moréas abandoned Symbolism, returned to the poetic style of the Renaissance, and founded the École Romane. When Moréas left the movement, Remy de Gourmont, one of the editors of the Le Mercure de France, became the most enthusiastic advocate of Symbolism. Gourmont was not only a critic but also wrote in all literary genres and even created book designs and typography based on Symbolist theories. However, most of these poets were practitioners rather than creators of symbolist poetical theory. Symbolism as poetry and theory was developed in the works of Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Tristan Corbière, five of the poets praised in Verlaine’s Poètes maudits (1884; The Cursed Poets, 2003).

The poetry of the Symbolists did not present concrete, realistic images and did not set forth ideas. Instead, it sought to convey nuances of feeling, states of mind, and the invisible world. It also suggested a connection between the world visible to the human eye and the invisible world that the Symbolists believed to be the real world. The qualities most appreciated in Symbolism were the poetry’s musicality, nuances, vagueness, and lightness. Meaning gave way to lyricism, and Symbolist poetry became poetry in its purest sense as it evolved into rhythm and sound.

Charles Baudelaire

Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861, 1868; Flowers of Evil, 1931), especially the poem “Correspondances” (“Correspondences”) by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), is the work to which Symbolism traces its origins. Baudelaire envisioned an invisible world beyond the one that appeared to the human eye. For him, everything he perceived was a portal to the invisible world, to the beyond. His senses, imagination, and intelligence—all superior in a poet—enabled him to unlock this invisible world and lead his readers and listeners into this world. The poem had to be heard because, for Baudelaire, the sound, the combination of syllables, alliterations, rhymes, and rhythms were as important, or more important, than the sense of the words of the poem.

In “Correspondences,” Baudelaire reveals that, for the most part, humans move through life without ever becoming aware of the real invisible world. Preoccupied by daily concerns and ambitions, people move within the temple of living pillars, which is nature, without ever hearing the words uttered. People are totally unaware of the symbols that observe all human activity with a friendly gaze. The last three stanzas of the poem present examples of the phenomenon of synesthesia, the correspondence of human sense perceptions. Baudelaire believed that the sensations received through the different senses interact, and that a visual perception could trigger an olfactory or tactile perception or recall a memory of such a sense perception. In the second stanza, he describes echoes that are merged into each other far away in the world beyond the visible world and present themselves in the visible world as perfumes, colors, and sounds reaching humans through the olfactory, visual, and auditory senses. In the third stanza, he uses images in which the sense impressions of the perfumes transform and result in unexpected stimulation of the senses. The first image is tactile, as the perfumes are compared to children’s flesh. The second is auditory, for these perfumes are as sweet as oboes; the third is visual, as the perfumes possess the greenness of prairies. The final verse of the stanza invokes other perfumes that are corrupted, rich, and triumphant; the image once again unites the sensatory reactions in a vague confusion. In the final stanza, Baudelaire reiterates the power or capacity of these elements to transport the soul as well as the senses into the invisible world of the spirit.

This invisible world that comforts the soul and transcends the misery of the materialistic world appears in many of Baudelaire’s poems. In “Elévation” (“Elevation”), he advises his spirit to leave the unhealthy reality of the visible world and to fly off to the other realm, where it can purify itself and drink the clear liquid fire. He celebrates the individual who can reach behind or beyond the boredom and misery of existence to the realm where serenity and light are found. Baudelaire speaks of the joy of those who can understand the language of flowers and mute things. The poem builds on the same theme as that of “Correspondences” and adds the theme of the voyage of the spirit. In the poem “Le Voyage” (“The Trip”), Baudelaire again treats this theme. The poem begins with a familair description of travel: sea voyage. At first, the travelers are homesick, but soon, the effect of the sea on their senses washes away all thoughts of the life they have left. In the next stanza, Baudelaire shifts from this description of everyday travel to the experiences of travelers who, like balloons, take flight for unknown sensations and pleasures beyond earthly human knowledge. Their voyage transports them away from the everyday material reality and into the ethereal other existence.

In his poems about cats, Baudelaire celebrates his concepts of mystery and of the au-délà, the realm beyond this world where all is comfort, solace, and pleasure. In “Le Chat” (“The Cat”), the cat is both in his apartment and in his spirit (mind and soul). The voice of the cat carries him into the invisible world. The smell and feel of the cat’s fur transport him. When he looks into the cat’s eyes and then into himself with his mind’s eye, he sees within his mind the cat’s eyes because there is a mysterious union, transference, and correspondence that transports the poet beyond his miseries and suffering.

Baudelaire’s poetry is vastly different from that of the Symbolist movement at the end of the century. It is the poetry of Decadence and the agony over the attraction to evil. Yet, it is also the quest for that beyond the visible world's misery, suffering, and impossibility. While Baudelaire is much more, he is the “first” Symbolist.

Arthur Rimbaud

Influenced by Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) envisioned the poet as a seer. He believed that it was necessary to achieve a deranged state of the senses and the mind to see into the hidden, inscrutable other existence where true reality could be found. He achieved this state by the use of drugs, particularly hashish. The Symbolist aspects of his poetry are found in his unconventional images, his suggestions of elsewhere, and the freedom and fluidity of his verse. “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) is his best-known poem and is the poem that had the greatest influence on the Symbolist movement. Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” was not published until 1883, when it appeared in the periodical Lutèce. He had, however, written it some time before his arrival in Paris in September 1871. The poem, which reflects Rimbaud’s familiarity with many works about the sea and exotic places and their inhabitants, both human and animal, brings to mind Baudelaire’s “The Trip.” However, Rimbaud’s poem is in no way an imitation of Baudelaire’s poem. The voyage becomes more vast, more exhilarated, and more intense as Rimbaud continually juxtaposes images drawn from the world of material reality with those of the imagination, of the other existence seen once the senses and the intellect have been altered.

Rimbaud’s entire poem is filled with mystery as it refuses to permit its reader or listener to understand or to definitively identify the “I” of the poem. The “I” implies the boat itself, which sails without guides, but it also suggests a person sailing on the aimless boat, and this image then slides into that of an imaginary voyage of the mind. Rimbaud enforces this vacillation of meaning by including concrete, real images and places such as European merchant ships, “redskins” and panthers, intermingled with images of unchained islands, of the “I” lighter than a cork dancing, and of the “I” bathed in the poem of the ocean. Rimbaud also alters his syntax so that it multiplies and confuses meaning. Consequently, the poem can be read from the point of view that rearranges the words and makes everyday sense out of what it says. However, if readers suspend their intellect and free their understanding so they can accept word combinations as they come, the so-called sense or meaning of the poem constantly changes and reproduces the image of the boat traveling unguided down the rivers and across the seas. The poem becomes the mind’s voyage into the transcendental otherworld. Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” was a rich source of symbols and images for the Symbolists.

Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), like Mallarmé, influenced the Symbolists most in his insistence on the musicality of poetry. Verlaine’s “L’Art poétique,” written in 1882 and published in Jadis et naguère (1884), was taken by the poets of the Symbolist movement as a set of standards for their poetic creation. In his poem, he emphasized that before everything else, the verses and language of a poem must create music. His poems attest to the value of this characteristic in poetry. Verlaine then proceeds to explain how to write poetry, which is music. He recommends an uneven rhythm created by verses with uneven syllables. Word choice is critical. He recommends joining together precise words and vague words. The poem then must be filled out with subtle nuances. Verlaine also admonishes the poet to avoid clever wit, cruel sarcasm, and dissolute and common images. Verlaine’s influence led the Symbolists away from the Decadent aspect of the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. His influence also directed them toward poetry that was less and less concerned with meaning and was directed toward pure lyricism as poetry became music in words.

Verlaine’s other significant contribution to the development of Symbolist poetry was his book The Cursed Poets, published by Vanier in 1884. In the text, Verlaine celebrated eight poets accursed by the sorrows of their lives and their alienation by a society that failed to appreciate their genius. The poets whom he declared absolute poets because of their imagination and their expression were Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Corbière, Gérard de Nerval, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mallarmé, and himself under the anagram of Pauvre Lelian. He included poems of each of the poets, a critique of the poems, and called attention to their work.

Tristan Corbière

While seven of the poets were well-known in poetic circles, Tristan Corbière (1845-1875) had received little attention. Afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis and tuberculosis, Corbière had spent the majority of his life at Roscoff in Bretagne. Corbière had written and published Les Amours jaunes (1873; These Jaundiced Loves, 1995), a book of Decadent and Symbolist poems, before he died in 1875. Corbière was a master of wordplay, exploiting the musical quality of language, creating startling images, and evoking the invisible otherworld. Through Verlaine, Corbière’s poetry influenced the development of the Symbolist movement.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was recognized as the leader of the Symbolist movement in the 1890s both for his poetic theory and for his poetic production. Mallarmé sought to create the essence of perfect form in his poetry, which he believed was contained in the nothingness beyond the reality of this world. He strived to write pure poetry free of all conventional meaning and sense and to use words so that they would have new meanings. For Mallarmé, words were used as symbols to evoke this essence. Mallarmé spent long hours refining his verse, searching for the right words, and reorganizing the syntax of his poems. Plagued by perfectionism in his poetic creation, he wrote only forty-nine poems. Mallarmé believed that the more ambiguous the sentence structure and the more complex the associations made, the better the poem. What had to be avoided was the telling of a story. The poem suggests that the imagination should be freed. His fascination with language and its infinite possibilities led him to write his experimental poem, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; A Dice-Throw, 1958; also as Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance, 1965), in which the lines of the poem are placed on the page such that it may be read following different patterns and giving different meanings. For Mallarmé and Verlaine, poetry was music in words. This made it essential for his poetry to be read aloud to reveal the subtle and complex meanings suggested by the words. The essence of his poetry was infused in the sounds of his poetry. Mallarmé’s work truly achieved the ultimate expression of Symbolism. Mallarmé regularly shared his theory with his guests at his Tuesday evening gatherings, thus playing a significant role in creating Symbolism as a form of poetry and movement.

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