The Modern French poets of the 19th century - “Read me, to learn to love me.”

One good reason that these posts do not get written is that I start poking around in the texts themselves, and since I now want to race through post-Romantic French poetry, I find myself a bit crushed.  Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé – it is all so wonderful.  And those are just the giants of the period.

In his “Épigraphe pour un livre condamné” (“Epigraph for a condemned book”), Baudelaire urges his “quiet” and “sober” readers to throw away his book Les Fleurs du mal, leaving it to those who know how to plunge their eyes into the gulfs.  “Lis-moi, pour apprendre à m'aimer” – “Read me, to learn to love me.”

Well, we sure did, even many of us who have never read him. Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du mal (1857) are the beginning, or the beginning of the end if you think it was a wrong turn.  It is because of Baudelaire that Modernism is Modern.

There are many aspects to Baudelaire, even within Les Fleurs du mal; I guess my preferred Baudelaire is the one who brought Romantic ideas about nature to the city.  Romantic in theory, since the young French Romantics have a pretty darn tenuous relationship with actual living nature.  They are awful citified.  Baudelaire is really looking around and writing about what he sees.  If he lived in Jura and wrote about bird’s nests and yeast, he would have been a Romantic, but he lived in Paris and wrote about apartment buildings, which is Modern.

Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.  (from “Le Cygne”)

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
has moved! new palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old neighborhoods, for me it all becomes allegory
And my memories are heavier than the rocks.  (from “The Swan”)

I read Les Fleurs du mal in French about a year ago, so I can sympathize with the French students clawing through it for the Bac.  It is pretty hard in places.  Mallarmé is probably still too hard for me, I mean if I am trying to understand him.  Tristan Corbière is too hard, the language too crazy.  Jules Laforgue looks about right.  Arthur Rimbaud is clearly within my level.

The easy one is Paul Verlaine.  Much of his best work, entire (miniature) books, are readable by someone with a semester of French, a real beginner.  The beauty of his sound is audible.  He generally does not use too many words.  They are often such an obstacle to the language-learner, the words.  Verlaine felt like a reward.  When I could not read very much, I could read him.  I have read his first four books in French – “books,” they are such little things – and will keep going someday.

Anyway.  It’s all a marvel.  A rupture.  The beginning of “make it new,” the beginning of  poetic tradition that has stretched with real continuity until – I am not sure.  Possibly not today.  Poetry has a large place in French culture; contemporary poetry, maybe not much at all.  Who knows what will happen.  Meanwhile, French high school students will spend this spring cramming Hugo, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire.  Good luck.

Ah! The endless egoism of adolescence - dithering around Rimbaud

I'm dithering.  I want to write about Arthur Rimbaud, and I don't.  A mental signal I should presumably heed.  yet now I'm writing.

Rimbaud is scary.  Not his poetry so much, not its complexity - Mallarmé is the one who really stumps me.  And it's not his behavior, although he was the sort of person I'm glad I don't know.  No, it's the intelligence of Rimbaud, the creative intelligence.  What do I mean?

Rimbaud's translators - both the Wallace Fowlie volume I quoted yesterday, for example, and the Paul Schmidt translation I prefer - compile not only Rimbaud's poems but his letters and school assignments and court testimony (not his best work).  Rimbaud's biography is crucial to their understanding of the poetry.  Because of references to his life,* or Paul Verlaine, or his mother?  No, not really, or not mostly.  It's something else.

Rimbaud began writing serious poetry at the age of fifteen.  He was all done by the time he was nineteen.  His career was so compact that the "phases" of his work cover a period of not years but months.  He moved so fast.  I kept referring back to the dates on the poems - he wrote this when he was how old?  And then his combination of perfectly mature craftsmanship and imagery with adolescent scatology and smirkiness confuses me.  Who else is like Rimbaud?  And this is all aside from his bizarre and dangerous moral ideas, aside from his pranks and absinthe abuse and chaos.

from Youth, Part III, "Twenty Years Old" (1875?)

Exiled the voices of instruction;
Physical ingenuousness staled in bitterness. . .
                                                                  . . . Adagio

Ah! The endless egoism of adolescence,
Its studious optimism:
   How the world this summer was full of flowers!
Dying airs, dying shapes . . .
A chorus to appease impotence and absence!
A chorus of glasses of nocturnal melodies . . .

(Of course, our nerves are quickly shot to hell!)

Translated by Paul Schmidt, Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, Harper & Row, 1967.

* I would like to draw the interested reader's attention to this review, by C. B. James, of Edmund White's recent little Rimbaud biography.  I would not normally recommend that a reader unfamiliar with an author's work bother with a biography, but Rimbaud is a special case, and White is as interested in the poetry as the gossip.  And what gossip!

Afloat with Rimbaud and Stevenson

A couple of weeks ago I was struggling with the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, with what result I know not, and at the same time reading Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1885).  I wondered, from time to time, if I was making a mistake. 

Into the furious lashing of the tides,
More heedless than children's brains, the other winter
I ran!  And loosened peninsulas
Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub.

Rimbaud's poetry is by turns obscene, blasphemous, poisonous, and head-splittingly obscure.  He's testing the boundaries of what poetry can do.  He's not incomprehensible - the speaker of this poem is, at this point, a boat, adrift on the ocean, pilotless, touring the world.

Dark brown is the river,
  Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
  With trees on either hand.

Stevenson's poems are anything but obscure.  They are simple in exactly the places where Rimbaud is complicated, transparent where he is obscure. 

Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children,
The green water penetrated my hull of fir
And washed me of spots of blue wine
And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook.

Rimbaud's imagery is intense, violent, and bizarre.  If I remember that this is a drifting boat, the meaning of the passage is clear enough.  It's the combination of images that is complicated - the blue wine, the green water, which is somehow sweet like an apple, but not sweet in the way I know, but like children taste.

Green leaves a-floating,
  Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating -
  Where will all come home?

Sometimes, when I turned from Rimbaud to Stevenson, the children's poems were crushed flat.  The plainest, sweetest song became insipid.  Sometimes, though, Stevenson's keen nostalgia was a necessary corrective to Rimbaud's adolescent nonsense.

I should have liked to show children those sunfish
Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish.
- Foam of flowers rocked my drifting
And ineffable winds winged me at times.

Sometimes, though, the poems began to interlace.  What is "The Drunken Boat" actually about?  My understanding is that Rimbaud had never actually seen the ocean when he composed this poem.  The adventures of the boat, which visits the poles and the "unbelievable Floridas," and hears "The moaning of Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms," are products of Rimbaud's reading and imagination.

On goes the river
  And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
  Away down the hill.

The Stevenson poem, presented here complete, is "Where Go the Boats?"  It is one of several poems on the theme of a boy playing with a paper boat, setting them adrift, wondering where they go.  The boy in Stevenson's poems wants, like Rimbaud's boat, "to rise and go \ Where the golden apples grow" ("Travel").

If I want a water of Europe, it is the black
Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.

So perhaps Rimbaud's boat is made of paper.  Perhaps the speaker is not the boat but the child.  Perhaps the two children will meet someday and share stories of their adventures.

"The Drunken Boat" was written in 1871.  Its author was seventeen years old.  It is among the greatest Modern poems.  The stanzas selected here are from Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, 1966, University of Chicago Press, translated by Wallace Fowlie.