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

David Evans traces the evolution of rhythmic and metrical theory and practice through each of these poets in works both in verse and prose. While finding in Benoît de Cornulier's approach to verse analysis (see FS, xl (1986), 98–99) 'little more than statistical catalogues of each poet's formal tendencies' (p. 16), Evans's argument follows the general development of each poet's style, rather than addressing the detailed structure of individual texts. By page 28, the notion of 'rhythm' is still unclear: 'Without God, the absolute value of rhythm, which guarantees the aesthetic superiority of metrical verse over prose, simply disappears'. What is the relation between 'rhythm' and 'metre'? His discussion draws on and adds to Cornulier's and Jean-Louis Guilbaud's methods of classifying cesural violations. He cites cases of verb phrases and noun phrases straddling the cesura, but does not distinguish phrases interrupted by a syntactic boundary from those which are not: 'fleurs/(?) nouvelles' (p. 46) is a syntactic unit, while 'la gorge( ) aime' is interrupted by a syntactic boundary, in other words, allows the insertion of a phrase after 'gorge'. Also reviewed are adjacent accents before and around the cesura (for instance, hideux tronc/'; dais/ d'arbres'). That these metrical violations acquire their stylistic force as exceptions to a rule of accentual alternation is assumed, but the implications are not discussed. Can the first element of a noun phrase carry a metrically significant accent? The reader is thus left in the dark about Evans's view of Cornulier's pronouncement that 'le vers français n'est pas accentuel', despite the fact that many of Baudelaire's manuscript corrections suggest a distinction between linguistic rhythm and a metrically ordered accent within the phrase. In tracing Baudelaire's journey from the idealization of nombre to disillusion, Evans concludes, unsurprisingly, that identical metrical structures can articulate contradictory meanings; that is, poetic meaning is a function of the relation between the semantic and the formal.

Discussion of Rimbaud's verse shows the incidence of violation of the cesural rule and the presence of juxtaposed accents increasing between the poems of 1871 and those of 1872. There are, however, ongoing problems in metrical analysis. The line 'L'ordre, éternel veilleur,// rame aux cieux lumineux' (p. 135), analysed as 1 +; 5//3 +; 3, treats accent within the noun phrases 'éternel veilleur' and 'cieux lumineux' inconsistently. Also the absence of an accent on 'rame' is inconsistent with his treatment of '//tombe des astres d'or' (p. 134). These inconsistencies stem from a continuing hesitation about the metrical status of accent within the phrase. Also a list of alexandrines within noun phrases straddling the cesura (p. 139) shows metrical accent on the first element of six noun phrases. Since the noun phrase is a syntactical unit, this needs explaning: it contradicts the standard assumption that a coupe marks only syntactic junctures.

Against Cornulier, Evans sees creative metrical disruption in Mallarmé's verse and examines his complex rhyme and vowel-harmony. The post-crisis poet continues to write verse, while maintaining the mystique or poetry in his criticism and correspondence. Overall, the concentration on violation of verse-unit boundaries leaves completely open the question of the possible stylistic function of accentual pattern within the verse-unit, a persistent locus of indecision in Evans's analysis. The 'resistance to definition' of poetic rhythm cited by the blurb on the back cover is likely to continue until this problem is addressed. Nevertheless, there is much here to stimulate experiment and reflection.