Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France by Roger Pearson (review)

It was no doubt irresistible, if somewhat misleading, for Roger Pearson to base his fascinating and exhaustive study of French Romantic poets as lawgivers on Shelley’s famous assertion in his Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840) that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’. For Shelley’s Defence is perhaps best read in the light of the astonishing achievements in the immediately preceding decades of English Romantic poetry (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats), in which the Imagination’s creative agency enabled the reformulation, often in densely imaged form, of human apprehensions of the world. The French Romantic writers studied by Pearson rarely achieve in their writing a comparable level of concentration and suggestive power. Pearson’s aim, however, is in part to show how the reflection in the early to mid-nineteenth century by Chateaubriand, Staël, Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny on the poet’s role as legislator anticipates and prepares its complete fulfilment — as both assertion and incarnation — in the work of the French Symbolists of the following generation. Part of his success in this lies in his identification of formulae — Hugo’s ‘certitude indéterminée’ (p. 503), Vigny’s comment on the poet as ‘étranger à ce qui se passe en lui-même’ (p. 541) — that prefigure Rimbaud or Mallarmé. However, such isolated expressions of explosive insight are not integrated, as they are with the English Romantics and the French Symbolists, into the fabric of the poetic text. In this respect, Pearson’s tendency, in discussing his selected writers, to allow a certain slippage between the concept of ‘acknowledged’ and ‘unacknowledged’ makes it more difficult to arrive at an accurate assessment of the degree to which Shelley’s formula is fully relevant to them. This is partly a result of Pearson’s commitment to an exhaustive appraisal of the poet as legislator in a more general sense across the œuvres of his five writers, in which, among other hazards, he has to negotiate ‘Hugolian logorrhoea’ (p. 480). However, despite being a noted Mallarmé specialist, Pearson resists the temptation of arresting this slide by clarifying the nature of Symbolist poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’, of which Mallarmé is the exemplary type. Mallarmé’s ‘Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, for instance, densely but comprehensively articulates what is at stake for the poet in this role. Here of course the aesthetic transformation of language is crucial — ‘Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu’ (l. 6) — as is the role of form. The poem does not, like Moses, deliver the tablets of the Law but is itself a ‘Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur’ (l. 12). The question of how this transformation came about in French poetry is left largely unanswered in Pearson’s discussion, leaving a telling gap: the grand absent from his book is Théophile Gautier, dismissed along with ‘so-called Parnassianism’ in a single sentence (p. 582). However, it was Gautier’s focus on art as form that precisely enabled French verse to transform itself from a discursive into an aesthetic legislation; it was correspondingly to Gautier that the Symbolists (Baudelaire, Mallarmé) paid the highest tribute as poetic legislator.