Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme (review)

This is a substantial, scholarly examination of rhythm and its oscillations in the formative projects of French poetic modernity. With his point of origin the loss of faith in the universal analogy, Evans focuses on the precarious relationship between harmony and disruption in metrical verse, vers libre, and prose poetry. Drawing on Benoît de Cornulier's métricométrie (but avoiding its arid excesses), Evans balances meticulous method with a deep sense of rhythmical structure – its motivation and its effect. Through the precariousness of rhythm in Baudelaire, Evans explores the tension between belief in the illusory poetic absolute and the modern poet's ironic consciousness of the void of meaning. As he charts the drive to rhythmic disruption and to rhyme enrichment in successive drafts of poems, Evans shows how the dual process of aggravating and correcting fractured harmony is integral to Les Fleurs du mal. Thus, a non-complex, linear development towards metric de-structuring is resisted, and the tension between harmonic veil and ironic discord is repeatedly dramatized as Baudelaire stages "interpretative uncertainty in the verse form itself" (78). Here, as throughout his study, Evans focuses on how the reader is drawn into the play of hesitation (over whether to favour rhyme consistency over rhythmic regularity, or to privilege rhythm over rhyme harmony). In a persuasive discussion of the prose poetry, Evans identifies in phantom verse rhythm the transposition of the search for external meaning in the pursuit of internal order. Again, Evans shifts the terms of the critical debate by arguing that the significance of Baudelaire's prose poetry lies less in the formal liberation it presents, than in its problematizing of poetic rhythm and thus in the preservation of Poetry's mystery. Turning to Rimbaud, Evans examines the increasing formal disruption of the earlier texts as belief in the universal analogy is destabilised, and poetry registers socio-cultural convulsions. Highlighting the fracture between metrical form and syntax, he exposes the shift from caesural displacements to increasingly daring enjambement and the staccato texture of line-initial accents. Evans reveals in Rimbaud, as in Baudelaire, a wilfully ironic correlation between rhyme strengthening and destabilizing of rhythmic accent. Whilst metrically insightful, his reading of "Le Bateau ivre" is uncontroversially posited on the precariousness of interpretation. As Evans charts Rimbaud's progress towards a "formally inclusive" poetics via the works of 1872, he demonstrates the shadowy persistence of form (in syllabic nombre) as metrical nombre vanishes. Speculating on the effect of disrupted isosyllabism on perceptions of poeticity leads Evans to assert the differential impact of predictable unpredictability and isolated rhythmic transgression. Further thoughtful engagement with reader reception highlights the contradictory practice that lures the reader, for example, to disrupt pronunciation rules in order to affirm rhythmic regularity. Evans explores allusions to musical order and architecture in the Illuminations, and identifies links with Baudelaire's prose poetry in metaphors of crossing and in "forms in perpetual process" (196). Alert to rival constructions of poeticity, Evans distances himself from critics who retrieve random metrical fragments to shore up restricted notions of poetic quality in the prose poems. Indeed, Evans makes clear that evidence of metrical structure, however partial and interrupted, raises more questions than it answers. In rhythmical patterning that surges and recedes, Evans tracks the variable self-staging of the poet himself, now as the guarantor of poetic truth, now as the perpetually tantalized and frustrated seeker after Poetry's mystery. In order to reconcile analysis of form and thematics in Mallarmé's post-1866 poetry, Evans begins by examining rhythm in the pre-crisis years. Patient tracking of sound patterns in an allegorical reading of "Hérodiade, Scène" exposes the tension between the envisioning of poetic ideal and the disruption of that ideal (inscribed in dissonant rejets, seventh-syllable stresses, rimes batelées, and the e caduc, inter alia). Responding to certain indications in Mallarmé's correspondence, Evans's comparative discussion of "Hérodiade, Scène" and "Le...