La poésie délivrée: le livre en question du Parnasse à Mallarmé par Nicolas Valazza (review)

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the publishing industry was booming: between 12,000 and 15,000 works published annually in France alone (20). Yet works of poetry were largely left out of this vast literary production. Valazza draws attention to how few of the canonical books of late nineteenth-century poetry actually were books: that is, printed, published, and promptly made available for purchase. Between censorship, posthumous publication, and even outright abandonment by their author (to cite one famous example, Rimbaud's 500 copies of Une saison en enfer, printed in 1873 but left at the publisher's shop, unclaimed and undiscovered until 1901), there is an important time gap between the production and critical reception of late nineteenth-century poetry, argues Valazza. The thesis of La poésie délivrée is that serious attempts to trace the evolution of poetic "modernity" must take into account poetry's chancy appearance and slow incubation, in distinct opposition to the heyday of Romantic superstars such as Hugo, Vigny, and Lamartine. Valazza traces Parnassian poets' efforts to differentiate their aesthetic from the Romantics', not just in style, but also in form of delivery: e.g., poets banding together in collective volumes of the Parnasse contemporain rather than single-author published books. Yet the Commune divided Parnassian poets politically, sinking the commercial fortunes of pro-Commune poets such as Verlaine and Rimbaud even further. Moving away from Parnassus and its most popular voice, the now-all-but-forgotten Academician François Coppée, more licentious works (in both senses) opposed the moral posturing of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, but they also opposed the formal rigidity of Parnassus. Valazza analyzes these angry, funny, often scabrous works of older authors such as Gautier and Baudelaire, as well as younger voices (Verlaine, Glatigny, Rimbaud). These "marginal" works, cut, censored or blocked from "legitimate" publication, found expression in clandestine or anonymous editions, as well as ephemera such as short-lived reviews, albums, and cabaret performance. One example: the six poems censored from the 1857 Fleurs du mal wound up in Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle, secretly published in Brussels. Valazza deftly traces the intertextuality between such works as the Album zutique and Verlaine's Cellulairement (written while the poet was incarcerated in Belgium 1873–75, unpublished until 1992), and François Coppée's bland (but popular) mediocrity. What more fitting illustration of "unliterary literature" (163) than Rimbaud's Illuminations: the scattered prose poems abandoned by Rimbaud himself, cobbled together by the Symbolist poet Gustave Kahn and published in partial form in 1886 (long after Rimbaud's own renunciation of the literary field): "un livre qui reste, en quelque sorte, en devenir," Valazza proposes (190). Rimbaud's (un)achievement prefigures Mallarmé's efforts to conceive an impossible "Livre," somehow dé-livré "du livre conventionnel" (216), leading to creative experiments with typography, use of white space, thickness of the paper and size of the page, but also (especially) to very little finished product. Memorable and thought-provoking, La poésie délivrée is a smart addition to studies of nineteenth-century poetry and the slippery evolutions of modernity.