Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud (review)

The temptation to view Parnassian poetry as a self-contained interlude between Romanticism and Symbolism overlooks the affinities between its practices and many of the poets considered to be outside it. This convergence is the starting point for Seth Whidden’s study, which argues that both Verlaine and Rimbaud engaged with Parnassian ideals throughout their work, not only in their respective experiments with versification but also in their ongoing preoccupation with ‘the destabilized lyric subject’. Although several of Verlaine’s early poems appeared in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain (1866), and Rimbaud submitted three poems to the second volume of 1871 (they were rejected), the departure from Parnassus does not simply denote the end of a juvenile period of influence. Instead, Whidden perceives it as a constant process of reaction, characterized by the multiple ways in which both poets question the relationship between the lyric subject and the world around it. An opening chapter, ‘The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry’, outlines its principal features, focusing on the thematic interest in statues and sculpture and the link to neo-classical prosody, which combine to present a traditional subject/object relationship where the invariably male lyric subject fixes an invariably female and immobile object, animate or inanimate. This is followed by two long discrete chapters on each poet, ‘Verlaine’s Identities’ and ‘Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space’, which offer a chronological discussion of their respective approaches to the lyric subject, illustrated by detailed close readings of representative texts. Whidden argues against a predominantly biographical reading of Verlaine’s assumption of different poetic personae, interpreting this recurrent process as the ‘constantly evolving search for poetic subjectivity’ (p. 68). He locates this initial questioning of the lyric subject in the ‘Parnassian’ poems of Poèmes saturniens, such as ‘Mon rêve familier’ and ‘L’Angoisse’. The remainder of the chapter traces different manifestations of this search: the love-struck subject of La Bonne Chanson; the deliberate vagueness and rhythmic experimentation of Romances sans paroles; the religious poems of Sagesse and other collections; the final play with gender roles in the explicitly sexual poems of Femmes and Hombres. In Rimbaud’s case, the spatio-temporal transformation of the lyric subject results from the dislocation of the fixed ‘je’, the gradual disappearance of human presence and the departure from fixed verse forms. Whidden emphasizes the spatial connotations of ‘sens’ in ‘le dérèglement de tous les sens’ as ‘directions’: this destabilization is located initially in early poems such as ‘Sensation’ and thereafter in hermetic verse poems such as the ‘Fêtes de la patience’ series and ‘Mémoire’. The chapter ends with a consideration of Illuminations; here, as elsewhere, Whidden is aware of well-trodden critical ground, but his exegeses of poems such as ‘H’, based around a reading of the name ‘Hortense’ as ‘hors-tense’ (p. 184), are always stimulating. The book’s conclusion feels somewhat perfunctory — it would have been interesting to have some kind of synthesis of the poets’ respective experiments — and at times the hypotheses are questionable: does the phrase ‘Plus rien à dire!’ in Verlaine’s ‘Langueur’ really approach ‘the limits of linguistic expression’ (p. 118), or does it simply refer to an empire (or emperor) with nothing left to say? But Whidden’s willingness to engage the reader through lively argument and analysis ensures that Leaving Parnassus constitutes an enriching addition to the literature on nineteenth-century French poetry.