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French Symbolist Poetry: An Anthology
English, French
First published January 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 18, 2013
An excellent collection. I've always been enamored with the floaty heads and shadows of the Symbolist movement in art so I'd thought I'd give the poetry a whirl. I discovered some groovy new poets like Corbiere and Giraud. Rimabud is here, Apollinaire, etc. The binding shattered when I was reading it. What could that mean? Tristan? Jean?
February 24, 2015
For the most obsessive bibliophiles, finding and reading certain obscure literary works can be greatly analogous to archeological discovery. For such adventurous readers, the obvious and, perhaps, redundantly reprinted “classics” serve as the dense and at times seemingly impenetrable strata through which one must burrow to find a terra incognita of strange new treasures. And yet still more excavation of forgotten wonders remains as the reader further delves into this unexpected discovery. Such was my experience upon finding and reading John and Mona Houston's anthology, French Symbolist Poetry.
Before discussing what I have found to be the selections of greatest interest, I will briefly mention the only potentially negative aspect of French Symbolist Poetry. Although a bilingual text, the translations are presented as a prose-like block; the French texts, however, have been respectfully presented in their original formats. For this reason, any excerpts I quote will be formatted as prose instead of poetry. It is too tedious a task to compare where the lines of the originals begin or end to their location in the reformatted translations. In any case, the majority of these poems have such a high level of natural musicality that this reformatting issue detracts from only the inferior selections.
Beyond the already widely discussed major Symbolist poets, the first noteworthy selection in French Symbolist Poetry comes from Georges Rodenbach. While his place in the Symbolist movement was and still is largely established upon his novel, Bruges-la-Morte, his poetry lucidly renders the haunted cityscapes of Belgium and the equally haunted inhabitants of its gloomy domain. The metaphors that Rodenbach uses to collapse physical and psychological territories may seem old-fashioned to contemporary readers who have become accustomed to less direct approaches to figurative language. A deeply contemplative melancholy, however, is Rodenbach's redeeming quality. In his poetry, an insolated mind often envies the dull serenity of the inanimate or, at best, attempts to ovecome its oppressed state by entertaining an illusion.“Invalids at the Window II” draws a somber vision of an isolated individual watching the movement of his frail hands in a mirror:
The white pair plunge and will vanish to nothingness when the mirror's water is dried up. He thinks then that soon he will no longer be able to follow them, when the flood of evening will be complete in this condensed water of the deep mirror. And is their flight not their death? (98-99)
While the image of the mirror has long been a cliché, especially in poetry, the presence of reflection in Rodenbach more often serves to distort or distance than contrive any sentimental portraits of self-recognition. Whether water or mirror, the reflective surfaces only deepen the illusion which existence has already become for Rodenbach's diseased and isolated figures. Grown all too self-aware, the invalid waits for the darkness of night to dissolve everything until even the mirror's glass no longer bears an image. While even the old patient in Mallarme's “The Windows” experiences a moment of transcendence upon glimpsing his reflection, Rodenbach's use of the mirror reflects only yet another facet of a self-conscious being's misery.
The next very worthwhile poet in this collection is Emile Verhaeren, another Belgian Symbolist. While Rodenbach's work quietly glows with a deeply contemplative melancholy, Verhaeren recalls the more violently sensual side of French poetry. Of course, Bauderlaire himself could have written the following line from “By the Water”: “Like the flesh of vulvas or gums, the poisonous flower petals move in the wind, lazy and slow, which rots them with unchanging autumns...”(108). Transforming the usually prosaic beauty of a flower into an image of carnal grotesquery is a highly identifiable motif of Symbolist poetry. The perversion of Nature's assumed purity by an analogy of human decadence is one of the primary ways by which the Symbolists aspired toward a vision of unnameable totality—and Verhaeren is certainly no exception.
“The Lady in Black” is another very Baudelairian piece, with its grimly urban setting and litany of lurid confessions:
I bite, between my arms, any force exacerbated by the pursuit of the same ends; I devour or am devoured. My teeth like golden stones illuminate me with their sparks: I am beautiful as death and serve all men like her. (106)
Verhaeren personalizes this otherwise typical Femme Fatale, by making her both masochistic and sadistic. She knowingly provokes the desires of her solicitors as intensely as she will gratify them. The boundlessness of her own desires inspires mortal dread within her spectators as much as she longs to consummate these erotic pangs with the throes of her own death.
Although these images and themes may seem familiar to reader of French poetry, Verhaeren's verse possesses much of its own forceful vision. Take “The One from the Horizon,” the powerful evocation of a nameless voyager:
And for a thousand years he had been struggling on the sea, swelling his twisted sails on the horizon, always toward the farthest distances with their stars redder than others, whose bloody crystals shatter in the sea. (115)
Unlike Baudelaire's often parodic treatment of grand voyages, Verhaeren's vision of the voyager is consistently sublime to the point that this legendary figure becomes something beyond humanity or, as the poet states, “an ocean creature.” This piece is certainly the best at displaying how Verhaeren's verse, while still adhering to rhyme, displays very natural-sounding and powerfully surging rhythms. Those who have been searching for Baudelairian poetry which moves beyond the vacuous imitations often found in the English Decadents should certainly pursue the works of Emile Verhaeren.
While I am pleased to have read the rare Gustave Kahn poems contained in this anthology, I would have been even more pleased to see a larger selection from his oeuvre (perhaps replacing Jules LaForgue's highly original though ultimately melodramatic verse, which takes up over twenty-five pages). Gustave Kahn's appeal, at least to me, is his use of elliptical though alluring phrases to greatly emotive effect. In this way, Kahn brings to mind a Mallarme who had redirected the anguish of aspiring toward an impossibly pure language through introspection rather than the abstract contemplation of objects in silence. “Tres loin...” suggests the presence of Mallarme in Kahn's work, even if a longing for the unnameable bears a far more personal mark:
Far, still father, far from the human visage, by the river, in the distance, by the lovely moon, the moon of those miners. Her white sorrow going from her mask to the earth and sealed by the nigh, near water sleeping in an old crate. Exile, distant exile! Will you ever find the palaces with brightly hung walls where your dream, amidst coolness, purity, brief passages of music, wishes to don the deep oblivion of "I loved you.” Stranger, beautiful stranger, if only I could sail on your rivers, between your black marble banks, and touch with my finger the old ivy of your nostalgic manors; if only I could come to life again, slow and suffering, renewed by the mental light of your springtimes... (140)
While the lunar ode has become as overdone as the aforementioned mirror motif in poetry, Kahn's poem surpasses the cliché by using suggestive language which broadens interpretation. His carefully ambiguous diction seduces the reader down the twisting corridors of each line. Those “black marble banks” or “nostalgic manors” could equally evoke some terrestrial estate or, perhaps, the dark side of the moon. By both denying human romance and veering from metaphysical obscurity, “Tres loin...” refuses to become either another moment of the poet's solitude before Nature's majesty or the all too prosaic and personal confession of love. But rather than preoccupying the reader with the trivial process of attributing meaning to words of potential ambiguity, Kahn draws the reader into the shadowy space remaining between these two possibilities: the inner experience of nameless longing. Although nowhere near as absolute as Mallarme's dream of an ultimate language, Kahn retains the purity of at least the intense yearning one might feel in moments of nocturnal solitude; whether when gazing upon the moon, recalling lost love or, as the poem most powerfully conveys, exploring that inner sanctum lying at the very limit of language—one's own thoughts.
As entrancing and enigmatic as “Tres loin...” is, Kahn's best work in this collection is “Vers le plein ciel...”:
Toward the elusive open sky pitches the vanishing ship, the citron-sailed ship of desperate evenings, beyond the tears of the waves and the ocellated fabric of their surface. The exiled harbors beyond the high seas, the harbors longed for from ephemeral mornings onward. By what anchor are the resting places of the high sea stayed? And the white knights fleeing the swamp, with their eyes on the infinity of primordial regret, so calm as they drink up in the eternal cup the despair caught in perpetual romances, wait for the sudden magic cordial of the ages to heal time. Toward the elusive open sky the boats deployed on the sea multiply the rhythms of perpetual oars, moving toward the vanishing harbors beyond the high sea. (143)
Once again, the voyage theme recurs with its evocation of a desire so intensely felt and yet always teasing the mind to summon a sufficiently definitive name. As in Kahn's other discussed poem,“Vers le plein ciel” employs convoluted sentence structures which, through certain rhythmic repetitions, gain a truly forceful, almost sermonic delivery. If one listens closely to each line, one can hear the cadence of the oars driving the ship which, like all inner experience, moves toward an ever-vanishing and ultimately nonexistent horizon.
The imagery of knights and the holy grail—of course, evoked only to more effectively illustrate this indefinable longing for the infinite—broadens the scope of this voyage to stand for humanity's ancient search for an escape from this mortal coil. Despite using such potent references, Kahn's poetry is often too complex to be read as bland metaphorical representations of the human mind. Instead, his poems are an evocation of mental states in which finite desire strives toward the inconceivably infinite. Whether in the accumulating power of his highly rhythmic verse or effectively ambiguous diction which often defies any definitive interpretation, Kahn's demands upon language to communicate the ineffable mark him as a true Symbolist poet.
While I will not write at length on any of the following poets, each has at least one selection that will certainly enthrall any seeker of obscure Symbolist poetry. Though found near the end of the anthology, Adolphe Rette's work is quintessentially Symbolist in being both deeply melancholy and also somewhat abstract. His poems, particularly “Wakes,” feature a nameless city as haunted as Rodenbach's Bruges, but its pessimistic tone tends more toward the universal than the personal. Albert Samain's “Lust” is a truly kaleidoscopic litany of carnal pleasures. I have never read a single work by any other poet—not even Baudelaire—which evokes the dark wonders of the flesh as alluringly and exhaustively as this Samain poem does. Though his only selected work, Rene Gihl's “Day of Wrath” presents a sublime vision of the world's end. At the other end of the mood spectrum, Max Elskamp's “Et c'est Lui...” speaks of Christ as a sailor whose return and depature no man can ever certainly know. Even being an irreligious reader, I found this poem to perfectly encapsulate the struggle between doubt and faith.
The most impressive aspect of this collection if how its wide selection of Symbolist poetry in this collection does not amount to mere literary novelty but, instead, offers a chance for English readers to read the work of very worthwhile poets who would have otherwise been inaccessible to most English-speaking readers. For this reason alone, I feel greatly indebted to John and Mona Houston for so diligently excavating these obscure literary wonders. So if you are deeply fascinated by the darkly melancholy and deeply sensual aura of Symbolist poetry but often find yourself frustrated with the limited translations, do not hesitate to add this excellent anthology to your collection.
Before discussing what I have found to be the selections of greatest interest, I will briefly mention the only potentially negative aspect of French Symbolist Poetry. Although a bilingual text, the translations are presented as a prose-like block; the French texts, however, have been respectfully presented in their original formats. For this reason, any excerpts I quote will be formatted as prose instead of poetry. It is too tedious a task to compare where the lines of the originals begin or end to their location in the reformatted translations. In any case, the majority of these poems have such a high level of natural musicality that this reformatting issue detracts from only the inferior selections.
Beyond the already widely discussed major Symbolist poets, the first noteworthy selection in French Symbolist Poetry comes from Georges Rodenbach. While his place in the Symbolist movement was and still is largely established upon his novel, Bruges-la-Morte, his poetry lucidly renders the haunted cityscapes of Belgium and the equally haunted inhabitants of its gloomy domain. The metaphors that Rodenbach uses to collapse physical and psychological territories may seem old-fashioned to contemporary readers who have become accustomed to less direct approaches to figurative language. A deeply contemplative melancholy, however, is Rodenbach's redeeming quality. In his poetry, an insolated mind often envies the dull serenity of the inanimate or, at best, attempts to ovecome its oppressed state by entertaining an illusion.“Invalids at the Window II” draws a somber vision of an isolated individual watching the movement of his frail hands in a mirror:
The white pair plunge and will vanish to nothingness when the mirror's water is dried up. He thinks then that soon he will no longer be able to follow them, when the flood of evening will be complete in this condensed water of the deep mirror. And is their flight not their death? (98-99)
While the image of the mirror has long been a cliché, especially in poetry, the presence of reflection in Rodenbach more often serves to distort or distance than contrive any sentimental portraits of self-recognition. Whether water or mirror, the reflective surfaces only deepen the illusion which existence has already become for Rodenbach's diseased and isolated figures. Grown all too self-aware, the invalid waits for the darkness of night to dissolve everything until even the mirror's glass no longer bears an image. While even the old patient in Mallarme's “The Windows” experiences a moment of transcendence upon glimpsing his reflection, Rodenbach's use of the mirror reflects only yet another facet of a self-conscious being's misery.
The next very worthwhile poet in this collection is Emile Verhaeren, another Belgian Symbolist. While Rodenbach's work quietly glows with a deeply contemplative melancholy, Verhaeren recalls the more violently sensual side of French poetry. Of course, Bauderlaire himself could have written the following line from “By the Water”: “Like the flesh of vulvas or gums, the poisonous flower petals move in the wind, lazy and slow, which rots them with unchanging autumns...”(108). Transforming the usually prosaic beauty of a flower into an image of carnal grotesquery is a highly identifiable motif of Symbolist poetry. The perversion of Nature's assumed purity by an analogy of human decadence is one of the primary ways by which the Symbolists aspired toward a vision of unnameable totality—and Verhaeren is certainly no exception.
“The Lady in Black” is another very Baudelairian piece, with its grimly urban setting and litany of lurid confessions:
I bite, between my arms, any force exacerbated by the pursuit of the same ends; I devour or am devoured. My teeth like golden stones illuminate me with their sparks: I am beautiful as death and serve all men like her. (106)
Verhaeren personalizes this otherwise typical Femme Fatale, by making her both masochistic and sadistic. She knowingly provokes the desires of her solicitors as intensely as she will gratify them. The boundlessness of her own desires inspires mortal dread within her spectators as much as she longs to consummate these erotic pangs with the throes of her own death.
Although these images and themes may seem familiar to reader of French poetry, Verhaeren's verse possesses much of its own forceful vision. Take “The One from the Horizon,” the powerful evocation of a nameless voyager:
And for a thousand years he had been struggling on the sea, swelling his twisted sails on the horizon, always toward the farthest distances with their stars redder than others, whose bloody crystals shatter in the sea. (115)
Unlike Baudelaire's often parodic treatment of grand voyages, Verhaeren's vision of the voyager is consistently sublime to the point that this legendary figure becomes something beyond humanity or, as the poet states, “an ocean creature.” This piece is certainly the best at displaying how Verhaeren's verse, while still adhering to rhyme, displays very natural-sounding and powerfully surging rhythms. Those who have been searching for Baudelairian poetry which moves beyond the vacuous imitations often found in the English Decadents should certainly pursue the works of Emile Verhaeren.
While I am pleased to have read the rare Gustave Kahn poems contained in this anthology, I would have been even more pleased to see a larger selection from his oeuvre (perhaps replacing Jules LaForgue's highly original though ultimately melodramatic verse, which takes up over twenty-five pages). Gustave Kahn's appeal, at least to me, is his use of elliptical though alluring phrases to greatly emotive effect. In this way, Kahn brings to mind a Mallarme who had redirected the anguish of aspiring toward an impossibly pure language through introspection rather than the abstract contemplation of objects in silence. “Tres loin...” suggests the presence of Mallarme in Kahn's work, even if a longing for the unnameable bears a far more personal mark:
Far, still father, far from the human visage, by the river, in the distance, by the lovely moon, the moon of those miners. Her white sorrow going from her mask to the earth and sealed by the nigh, near water sleeping in an old crate. Exile, distant exile! Will you ever find the palaces with brightly hung walls where your dream, amidst coolness, purity, brief passages of music, wishes to don the deep oblivion of "I loved you.” Stranger, beautiful stranger, if only I could sail on your rivers, between your black marble banks, and touch with my finger the old ivy of your nostalgic manors; if only I could come to life again, slow and suffering, renewed by the mental light of your springtimes... (140)
While the lunar ode has become as overdone as the aforementioned mirror motif in poetry, Kahn's poem surpasses the cliché by using suggestive language which broadens interpretation. His carefully ambiguous diction seduces the reader down the twisting corridors of each line. Those “black marble banks” or “nostalgic manors” could equally evoke some terrestrial estate or, perhaps, the dark side of the moon. By both denying human romance and veering from metaphysical obscurity, “Tres loin...” refuses to become either another moment of the poet's solitude before Nature's majesty or the all too prosaic and personal confession of love. But rather than preoccupying the reader with the trivial process of attributing meaning to words of potential ambiguity, Kahn draws the reader into the shadowy space remaining between these two possibilities: the inner experience of nameless longing. Although nowhere near as absolute as Mallarme's dream of an ultimate language, Kahn retains the purity of at least the intense yearning one might feel in moments of nocturnal solitude; whether when gazing upon the moon, recalling lost love or, as the poem most powerfully conveys, exploring that inner sanctum lying at the very limit of language—one's own thoughts.
As entrancing and enigmatic as “Tres loin...” is, Kahn's best work in this collection is “Vers le plein ciel...”:
Toward the elusive open sky pitches the vanishing ship, the citron-sailed ship of desperate evenings, beyond the tears of the waves and the ocellated fabric of their surface. The exiled harbors beyond the high seas, the harbors longed for from ephemeral mornings onward. By what anchor are the resting places of the high sea stayed? And the white knights fleeing the swamp, with their eyes on the infinity of primordial regret, so calm as they drink up in the eternal cup the despair caught in perpetual romances, wait for the sudden magic cordial of the ages to heal time. Toward the elusive open sky the boats deployed on the sea multiply the rhythms of perpetual oars, moving toward the vanishing harbors beyond the high sea. (143)
Once again, the voyage theme recurs with its evocation of a desire so intensely felt and yet always teasing the mind to summon a sufficiently definitive name. As in Kahn's other discussed poem,“Vers le plein ciel” employs convoluted sentence structures which, through certain rhythmic repetitions, gain a truly forceful, almost sermonic delivery. If one listens closely to each line, one can hear the cadence of the oars driving the ship which, like all inner experience, moves toward an ever-vanishing and ultimately nonexistent horizon.
The imagery of knights and the holy grail—of course, evoked only to more effectively illustrate this indefinable longing for the infinite—broadens the scope of this voyage to stand for humanity's ancient search for an escape from this mortal coil. Despite using such potent references, Kahn's poetry is often too complex to be read as bland metaphorical representations of the human mind. Instead, his poems are an evocation of mental states in which finite desire strives toward the inconceivably infinite. Whether in the accumulating power of his highly rhythmic verse or effectively ambiguous diction which often defies any definitive interpretation, Kahn's demands upon language to communicate the ineffable mark him as a true Symbolist poet.
While I will not write at length on any of the following poets, each has at least one selection that will certainly enthrall any seeker of obscure Symbolist poetry. Though found near the end of the anthology, Adolphe Rette's work is quintessentially Symbolist in being both deeply melancholy and also somewhat abstract. His poems, particularly “Wakes,” feature a nameless city as haunted as Rodenbach's Bruges, but its pessimistic tone tends more toward the universal than the personal. Albert Samain's “Lust” is a truly kaleidoscopic litany of carnal pleasures. I have never read a single work by any other poet—not even Baudelaire—which evokes the dark wonders of the flesh as alluringly and exhaustively as this Samain poem does. Though his only selected work, Rene Gihl's “Day of Wrath” presents a sublime vision of the world's end. At the other end of the mood spectrum, Max Elskamp's “Et c'est Lui...” speaks of Christ as a sailor whose return and depature no man can ever certainly know. Even being an irreligious reader, I found this poem to perfectly encapsulate the struggle between doubt and faith.
The most impressive aspect of this collection if how its wide selection of Symbolist poetry in this collection does not amount to mere literary novelty but, instead, offers a chance for English readers to read the work of very worthwhile poets who would have otherwise been inaccessible to most English-speaking readers. For this reason alone, I feel greatly indebted to John and Mona Houston for so diligently excavating these obscure literary wonders. So if you are deeply fascinated by the darkly melancholy and deeply sensual aura of Symbolist poetry but often find yourself frustrated with the limited translations, do not hesitate to add this excellent anthology to your collection.
November 19, 2019
one of my first encounters with saint-pol-roux who i'm conviced is a past love of mine...
June 19, 2025
This is a very good selection/anthology of French poems, with good to excellent translations. It commences with Mallarmé's poems, which are dense but rewarding with study. My only complaint is the formatting. The English translations are condensed like prose; ideally poetic translations should have the same line spacing as on original, on the opposite page.
I read this anthology first when at university studying French, and later purchased a second hand hard-cover version, which is still is vet good condition bar some spots of brownish acidification. I wrote an essay for a French class about Mallarmé's sonnet “Le Cygne”, which was and still is one of my favourite poems in any language “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui…”
I read this anthology first when at university studying French, and later purchased a second hand hard-cover version, which is still is vet good condition bar some spots of brownish acidification. I wrote an essay for a French class about Mallarmé's sonnet “Le Cygne”, which was and still is one of my favourite poems in any language “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui…”
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