Rhythm Illusion And The Poetic Idea

Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea explores the concept of rhythm and its central yet problematic role in defining modern French poetry. Forging innovative lines of inquiry linking the detailed analysis of poetic form to the evolution of fundamental aesthetic principles, David Evans offers extensive new readings of the literary and critical writings of the three major poets at the centre of France’s most important poetic revolution. The volume is of interest to all students and readers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, since here is presented for the first time a thorough comparative study of developments in each writer’s poetic form and theory, focusing on the themes of illusion, deception and the musical metaphor. The book is also intended to stimulate wider critical debate on the interpretation of metrical verse, prose poetry and vers libre, and offers original analytical methods which facilitate the study of poetic form. The author proposes a radical shift in our understanding of the role and mechanisms of poetic rhythm, suggesting that its very resistance to definition and fixity provides a conveniently opaque veil over the difficulties of defining poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea explores the concept of rhythm and its central yet problematic role in defining modern French poetry. Forging innovative lines of inquiry linking the detailed analysis of poetic form to the evolution of fundamental aesthetic principles, David Evans offers extensive new readings of the literary and critical writings of the three major poets at the centre of France's most important poetic revolution. The volume is of interest to all students and readers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, since here is presented for the first time a thorough comparative study of developments in each writer's poetic form and theory, focusing on the themes of illusion, deception and the musical metaphor. The book is also intended to stimulate wider critical debate on the interpretation of metrical verse, prose poetry and vers libre, and offers original analytical methods which facilitate the study of poetic form. The author proposes a radical shift in our understanding of the role and mechanisms of poetic rhythm, suggesting that its very resistance to definition and fixity provides a conveniently opaque veil over the difficulties of defining poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The essays in this volume contribute diversely towards a revision and a reconceptualization of nineteenth-century France, with many adopting interdisciplinary methodologies attentive to the interplay between literature, history, art, popular and high culture, politics and science.

Why do we find it hard to explain what happens when words are set to music? This study looks at the kind of language we use to describe word/music relations, both in the academic literature and in manuals for singers or programme notes prepared by professional musicians. Helen Abbott's critique of word/music relations interrogates overlaps emerging from a range of academic disciplines including translation theory, adaptation theory, word/music theory, as well as critical musicology, métricométrie, and cognitive neuroscience. It also draws on other resources-whether adhesion science or financial modelling-to inform a new approach to analysing song in a model proposed here as the assemblage model. The assemblage model has two key stages of analysis. The first stage examines the bonds formed between the multiple layers that make up a song setting (including metre/prosody, form/structure, sound repetition, semantics, and live performance options). The second stage considers the overall outcome of each song in terms of the intensity or stability of the words and music present in a song (accretion/dilution). Taking the work of the major nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) as its main impetus, the volume examines how Baudelaire's poetry has inspired composers of all genres across the globe, from the 1860s to the present day. The case studies focus on Baudelaire song sets by European composers between 1880 and 1930, specifically Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, Alexander Gretchaninov, Louis Vierne, and Alban Berg. Using this corpus, it tests out the assemblage model to uncover what happens to Baudelaire's poetry when it is set to music. It factors in the realities of song as a live performance genre, and reveals which parameters of song emerge as standard for French text-setting, and where composers diverge in their approach.

Drawing on thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Lefebvre, Meschonnic, and Virilio, this book explores the concept of rhythms in relation to questions of temporality and the everyday, technology and the city, poetry and autobiography, space and the body in performance.

Bodies abound in Rimbaud's poetry in a way that is nearly unprecedented in the nineteenth-century poetic canon: lazy, creative, rule-breaking bodies, queer bodies, marginalized and impoverished bodies, revolting and revolutionary, historical bodies. The question that Poetry, Politics, and the Body seeks to answer is: What does this corporeal density mean for reading Rimbaud? What kind of sense are we to make of this omnipresence of the body in the Rimbaldian corpus, from first to last–from the earliest poems in verse celebrating the sheer, simple delight of running away from wherever one is and stretching one's legs out under a table, to the ultimate flight away from poetry itself? In response, this book argues that the body appears–often literally–as a kind of gap, breach, or aperture through which Rimbaud's poems enter into contact with history and a larger body of other texts. Simply put, the body is privileged 'lyrical material' for Rimbaud: a figure for human beings in their exposed, finite creatureliness and in their unpredictable agency and interconnectedness. Its presence in the early work allows us not only to contemplate what a strange, sensuous thing it is to be embodied, to be both singular and part of a collective, it also allows the poet to diagnose, and the reader to perceive, a set of seemingly intractable, 'real' socio-economic, political, and symbolic problems. Rimbaud's bodies are, in other words, utopian bodies: sites where the historical and the lyrical, the ideal and the material, do not so much cancel each other out as become caught up in one another.

As the status of poetry became less and less certain over the course of the nineteenth century, poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé began to explore ways to ensure that poetry would not be overtaken by music in the hierarchy of the arts. Helen Abbott examines the verse and prose poetry of these two important poets, together with their critical writings, to address how their attitudes towards the performance practice of poetry influenced the future of both poetry and music. Central to her analysis is the issue of 'voice', a term that remains elusive in spite of its broad application. Acknowledging that voice can be physical, textual and symbolic, Abbott explores the meaning of voice in terms of four categories: (1) rhetoric, specifically the rules governing the deployment of voice in poetry; (2) the human body and its effect on how voice is used in poetry; (3) exchange, that is, the way voices either interact or fail to interact; and (4) music, specifically the question of whether poetry should be sung. Abbott shows how Baudelaire and Mallarmé exploit the complexity and instability of the notion of voice to propose a new aesthetic that situates poetry between conversation and music. Voice thus becomes an important process of interaction and exchange rather than something stable or static; the implications of this for Baudelaire and Mallarmé are profoundly significant, since it maps out the possible future of poetry.

This book offers the first comprehensive close reading in any language of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Taking full account of his critical writings on literature and the fine arts, it provides fresh readings of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris. It situates these works within the context of nineteenth-century French literature and culture and reassesses Baudelaire's reputation as the 'father' of modern poetry. Whereas he is traditionally considered to have rejected the public role of the writer as moralist, educator, and political leader and to have dedicated himself instead to the exclusive pursuit of beauty in art, this book contends not only that he rejected Art for Art's sake but that he saw in 'beauty'—defined not as an inherent quality but as an effect of harmony and rich conjecture—an alternative ethos with which to resist the tyrannies of ideology and conformism. Contrarian in his thinking and provocatively innovative in his poetic practice, Baudelaire fell foul of the law when six poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) were banned for obscenity. In the second edition (1861), substantially recast and enlarged, the poet as alternative lawgiver made plainer still his resistance to the orthodoxies of his day. In a series of major critical articles he proclaimed the 'government of the imagination', while from 1855 until his death he developed an alternative literary form, the prose poem—a thing of beauty and an invitation to imagine the world afresh, to make our own rules.