French literature From 1850 to 1900
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same
essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing themselves
to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of
beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the middle of the Enlightenment
into the importance of historical and social specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of the
Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(1852–70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist society,
even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in progress
through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of
mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in 1871, there
was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the entrepreneurial
world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different forms of social
organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was already beginning
to find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often
treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is
Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections
Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”), Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic
quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured to create
an overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published
clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-
Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly comic and
cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and
oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light
of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty,
and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and representative of humanity,
penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. La
Légende des siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems are a series of historical and
mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Charles-Marie-
René Leconte de Lisle’s work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly
research. Together they form not only an intensely personal and imaginative account of the
origins and development of French culture and society but a key text for students of the
representation of the European cultural tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to
writing short lyrics on personal themes, although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as
the collections he churned out in the 1880s testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetry—stressing form over social
engagement—was incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand
themes in the grand manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking
idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake”—
a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux et camées
(1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make
something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their
triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s.
Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the
language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very
restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual
unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion
for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art
form to another, particularly those based on music.
Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work of Théodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined
to the formalism of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle, who came to
be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poèmes antiques (1852;
“Antique Poems”), Poèmes barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes tragiques (1884;
“Tragic Poems”). Although his theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest
affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry
was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth,
and he believed in the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material
surface of his poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of
mankind presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably
toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of
evolution. The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of
exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a
destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle’s manner
and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophées
(The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.
Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by the
desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory poem
opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is as misguided to
look for consistency in Baudelaire’s critical works (such as L’Art romantique and Curiosités
esthétiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry, since his ideas evolved
constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845–64). To two
basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the responsibility of the artist, the
representative of humanity, to create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw material of
life; and that the material world, like the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by
forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of these explains the importance that he assigns to
intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into
the world about him. The second led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could
rise above material corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur
without the stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with in
formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a poet deeply
concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He located morality for the
artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his generation) in his effort to
see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The artist must bring
clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy,
fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a “self” who struggles to
transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he finds, thrilling
—urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern landscape of masses
and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey, death stands revealed as the
matter and the form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and the final thrill is the
sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses
mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the
impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances banality
and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the
chaos of forms and experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes
en prose (1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the
balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist and crowd, and the
degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the
prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of syntax that, in Walter
Benjamin’s insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself and his contemporaries their
appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the
interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected
vision, the rhythms of pleasure and terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in
Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939).
