Of Beauty and Cruelty: A Brief Tour of the French Poetic Sublime, Part Two
- Elijah Perseus Blumov
- Jul 26
- 17 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Elijah Perseus Blumov
Leconte de Lisle: The Inhuman Sublime
As in life, there is too much to see in too little time. We must bid salut et adieu to the Enlightenment philosophes and the stranglehold of Voltaire upon the 18th century; to the roaring rebuke of neoclassical rationalism and Rousseauian lionization of feeling, fantasy, and freedom embodied by early 19th century Romantics like Chateaubriand and Hugo. At the transformation of the Romantic realism of Balzac into the “pure” realism of Flaubert, we will pause, and look at the parallel poetic shore: there, we shall see quite a spectacle indeed.
There, beyond the verdigris of wrought iron and misted panes of glass, lies a lush jungle of palms and ferns, scarlet hibiscuses and pink-tinged lotuses, poisonous vines and carnivorous blooms, spiky, motley-colored fruits unknown. Bolts of color burst from leafy clouds of verdure as macaws, parakeets, and birds of paradise flit from bough to bough; the glistening scales of a coiled python flash in the underbrush; a bloodcurdling squeal, a sickening crunch: in a clearing, a pied jaguar, terrible beauty incarnate, eviscerates its prey. It is a savage scene out of Rousseau–Henri this time, not Jean-Jacques.
Adjacent to this menagerie, another marvel: a labyrinth of long arcades and galleries, filled with the glorious detritus of human history. Here are the remains of Viking helmets and Theban vases; Hindu idols and Egyptian sarcophagi; Turkish scimitars and conquistador muskets. What do the menagerie and the museum have in common? They are places to observe, to give oneself up to the scrutiny of objects; places to contemplate the cruelty and beauty of nature and human history. Such was the goal of the Parnassian poets.
The Parnassian project was the brainchild of Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894), known to history simply as “Leconte de Lisle,” which, appropriately enough, literally translates to “Story of the Island.” Born on the remote tropical isle of Réunion off the coast of Madagascar, Leconte’s mind was formed by his jungle environs, and the chic urbanity of Paris, where he later lived as an adult, seemed to him effete and decadent by comparison. A fierce partisan of democracy, he was permanently embittered by the failure of the 1848 revolution, and resolved thereafter, like so many others of that time, to dispense with Romantic idealism. In the novel, the new wave of pessimist realism suffused with Romantic DNA led to Madame Bovary; in poetry, it led to what would become Parnassianism.
The ideological origins of this movement were several: Leconte became, like Wagner and many others, a devotee of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Schopenhauer, creating an idiosyncratic synthesis of Buddhism and Kantian philosophy, believed that space-time is merely a representation (Kant’s phenomena, the Buddha’s maya) of an insatiable, endlessly suffering cosmic Will (Kant’s noumena, the Buddha’s dukkha). The only way to temporarily escape from the pangs of this desire is to separate oneself from it by objectifying and contemplating its actions from a distance. Art, in turn, is of paramount spiritual importance because its essential function is to allow us to do just that– vicariously experience renditions of reality from a detached viewpoint. Inspired by the Kantian notion that aesthetic experience is disinterested– pleasurable, but not desire-inducing– Schopenhauer saw art as the ultimate means to achieve a state of metaphysical liberation and ego death (nirvana). This mystico-religious view of art was obviously appealing to artists, but also more generally to a spiritually desperate world hungry for an alternative to both orthodox religion and scientific positivism.
Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic disinterest was particularly appealing to artists who were sick of the Romantics’ emotional indulgence and elevation of the self. On the contrary, some said, art should be an escape from personality (Eliot was later to parrot this stance), and should seek to provide an emotionally restrained picture of reality that is both objectively accurate (here we see the positivist influence) and vividly sensuous. Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) pioneered the idea of “art for art’s sake” (later parroted by Wilde), and so pioneered the school of Aestheticism. Contra the original Romantics, Aesthetes believed that art should not meddle with politics and morality, nor express the overflowing feelings of the self– such things were gross impurities. Art’s only obligation, they believed, was to be beautiful. Aestheticism is thus, in theory, merely a refined sort of hedonism, though once we bring in Schopenhauer’s notions of the spiritual value of aesthetic contemplation, we can see how Aestheticism quickly turned into a “cult of art.”
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Gautier’s aestheticism, and the Comtean vogue for scientific positivism all influenced the development of Parnassianism (this moniker originated somewhat arbitrarily from the names of the anthologies most associated with the movement). Leconte desired a poetry that would describe, with the objectivity of a naturalist, the scintillating beauty and cruelty of both the world and the human condition. Art could thus serve the dual function of being both an escape from reality and a spiritual education in it. To best serve these aims, Leconte focused his poetry on two major subjects: world history and mythology, and the natural world. His long, rambling, and overwrought historic and mythic poems are rarely read these days (far better in this vein are the lapidary sonnets of his disciple, the Cubano-French poet José Maria de Heredia), but his daringly original poems about the grace and brutality of animals retain a haunting, inhuman power, and without their inspiration, we would almost certainly not have Baudelaire’s cats, Tennyson’s eagle, Rilke’s panther, or Campbell’s zebras. As an example, we may take the magnificent concluding stanzas from his poem, “The Aboma,” here given in recently deceased poet David Slavitt’s flawed but serviceable translation. After a splendid panoramic description of jungle scenes, we have:
But out on the island nestled in his bed
of moss, roused from his drowse by this bruit,
the Aboma, the king of the pythons, languidly
uncoils his spiral and rears his gorgeous head.
The animal’s muscles that seem to be made of steel
arch his neck and allow the light to play
on his lovely scales he seems to like to display.
It rears higher in the pride that princes feel.
Topaz and emerald gleam from his armor. Like
an ancient idol still in its temple niche
he is bathed in light and he dreams extravagant rich
visions. His eyes dart. He is ready to strike.
In time, when heaven’s heat comes beating upon
the river water as well as the earth, he dives
in and goes after prey. Nothing survives–
neither strong bull, quick jaguar, nor man.
Leconte’s acute sensitivity to the natural world enabled him to anticipate, shockingly early, the concerns of environmental poetry, and I think there is a strong case to be made that he invented the subgenre. In “The Virgin Forest,” we read the all-too-relevant lines:
On this scorching beach where your sand is packed hard
large angular pieces of shadow loom
of heavy equipment brought here for your doom.
The elephants gaze as if they were on guard.
Think of a line of ants going someplace
although some are crushed and some are burned but still
moving: so does time, as if with a will
of its own, bring you the man with the pale face
who will come in his swarms to gnaw with an appetite
that nothing in this world can satisfy.
Your bounty on which so many creatures rely
he will arrogate to himself as if by right.
He will uproot your beautiful baobab trees;
he will dredge the beds of your rivers or dam them; he
will make even your strongest children flee,
although he is more fragile than any of these.
Worse than random lightning that strikes you, he
will torch your hillsides, valleys, and wide plains,
imposing upon you not by strength but brains
to exploit whatever he can of your sacred debris.
I can hear the crashing noises from the abyss,
the drunken laughter, the shouts and cries of despair.
I can feel it deep in the ground and in the air.
And he will not even see what he takes as his.
But you can sleep in your great good night and know
neither regret nor thoughts of revenge: his tears
will water your ashes in not so many years,
expressing the grief you do not deign to show.
Many poets wish to be prophets–Leconte was one. The translation which does his poetry the justice it deserves has yet to be written. His perspective, which simultaneously accepts the alien savagery of nature yet urges us to celebrate and preserve its beauty, and which properly views the greed of mankind as a far worse thing than an amoral universe, is a viewpoint well-fitted to the deranged hyper-capitalism of our times.
Paul Valéry: The Intellectual Sublime
Reader, the sun is setting. Heavens! We must have dozed off, for we are now far afield of Paris. Very far indeed, for look–there is the ocean, glimmering gold and blood in the twilight. Purple banks of fog roll over the surface of the waters, and phantasmic chimeras coalesce in the mind’s eye: is that not the palatial dome of some dissipated raja on the horizon? Is that not a Chinese dragon, spinning toward the dying sun? Are these not Persian carpets, radiating upon the tides? Are these jets of white seafoam not the martyrdom of exploding angels? My heart is sick, and I feel strange, reader– a nameless beauty overwhelms me. I seem to hear, somewhere in the depths of the air, a song never sung before. How to set this music to words? Or, is it language itself which must bow before this silent music?
Such were the questions which haunted Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), the father of the Symbolist movement and, by extension, the father of literary Modernism. And just what is Symbolism? No matter how many ways I could frame an explanation of this ethereal and unprecedented approach to art, I feel like I would miss something. Fittingly enough, this elusiveness is itself an example of the Symbolist effect.
In the context of the Symbolist movement, a “symbol” is not, like an allegory or metaphor, a thing which exactly signifies or corresponds to some other thing– rather, it refers to an image, sound, or combination of these capable of evoking a complex web of associations which verge on the ineffable. Symbolist poetry seeks to provoke indescribable feelings and perceptions, and so must do so not through description but indirect suggestion– as Mallarmé said, it is poetry’s job to depict “not the thing, but the effect it produces.” As Chad Michael Michaels said: “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative!”
Symbolism shares with its parent movements, Aestheticism and Parnassianism, a desire for formal perfection and impersonality, a firm belief that art is autotelic and independent of worldly concerns, and a deep (ultimately Romantic) attraction to Schopenhauer; it shares with its sister movement, Impressionism, the prioritization of suggestion over description, atmosphere over message; and it shares with its anarchic child, Abstraction, a desire to create a “pure” art purged of all content, an ascetic exercise in form; this formal purity, in turn, Platonically reveals itself to have its own content: the mystical Ideal. As Jean Moréas (himself a Greek) wrote in his seminal manifesto, Le Symbolisme, the goal of art is to “clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form.”
From Plato’s dualism of matter and form, we can easily find our way back to Schopenhauer’s dualism of representation and will. Like Plato and the Buddha, Schopenhauer believed that the goal of human life ought to be to detach ourselves from the material world of illusion offered to us by our senses, and seek a transcendent truth beyond the veil of perception. Unlike Plato and the Buddha, Schopenhauer did not believe that liberation from the material world, much less liberation from desire, was ever entirely possible– hence his pessimism. For him, suffering and desire are not simply benighted states that one can transcend through enlightenment, because suffering and desire lie at the very essence of reality itself. As I have mentioned, Schopenhauer did believe that we could find temporary relief from cosmic suffering by alienating ourselves from it through the experience of art. Famously, he believed that of all arts, music was the supreme means by which one could temporarily free oneself from the Will, because music is non-representational: because music is not “about” anything, it frees us from the illusions of material representation completely and allows us to view the Will itself objectively and outside ourselves; we become witnesses to the spectacle of cosmic desire, transfixed in a liberated state of tragic rapture.
It was under this Schopenhauerian belief in the supremacy of music (and under the spell of Schopenhauer’s champion and proof of concept, the mighty Wagner) that artists in other media began to attempt, in Walter Pater’s words, to “aspire to the condition of music,” pursuing a trajectory away from direct representation which would eventually lead to total abstraction. This trajectory was also encouraged by more material pressures: as photography came to dominate the visual world and expository prose came to dominate the world of letters, painters and poets (among others) faced a crisis of identity– against such representative precision, what could their arts do that their modern rivals couldn’t? What was the inimitable essence of painting, the essence of poetry? Such considerations led many down the path of pure formalism. Moreover, as crises of religious faith continued to get more dire, many sought in such formalism a Platonic, mystical salvation.
Mallarmé was one of the first to feel where the winds were blowing, and was the first to dare sail the ship of poetry to its logical destination. Like his proto-modernist predecessor Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), he found poetry’s answer to Schopenhauer and positivist rigor alike in the work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), who had argued in The Poetic Principle that poems ought to be sensuous incantations that transport the imagination beyond the material world, and yet who offered an utterly methodical approach to achieving this poetic effect in his Philosophy of Composition. This use of rational, impersonal deliberation to achieve an irrational, personal effect would prove central to the Symbolist and later Modernist program, and is what allowed many Modernists to convince themselves that they were more “Classical” than Romantic. In truth, however, they were footnotes to the author of “The Raven.”
As his views developed, Mallarmé began to host Tuesday salons where he held forth about his new vision for poetry. Appropriately enough for his mystical, obscure approach, he became a kind of cult figure in the Parisian art scene, and acquired not only a dedicated circle of regular followers, but often received obeisant pilgrims such as W.B. Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, two of the most significant poets of the 20th century (and we are about to meet a third). It is no exaggeration to say that Mallarmé’s humble abode was the original hotbed of Modernism. At his salons, he would say things like the following remark made to Jules Huret:
"To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the delight of the poem, which consists in the pleasure of guessing little by little; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object, gradually in order to reveal a state of the soul or, inversely, to choose an object and from it identify a state of the soul, by a series of deciphering operations... There must always be enigma in poetry."
Après Mallarmé, la Déluge
I have spent so much precious space talking of Mallarmé and Symbolism because the poet I would most like to talk about, Paul Valéry (1871-1945), cannot be understood otherwise. Valéry was Mallarmé’s most brilliant disciple, and was viewed by many as his heir apparent. The question, “After Mallarmé, what is there to be done in poetry?” haunted Valéry (as it continues to haunt us over a century later), and caused him to give up poetry, the great passion of his youth, for twenty years. That vast period of silence, however, was not idle. He immersed himself in the latest developments in philosophy and science (eventually becoming friends with Bergson and Einstein), turned his mind upon itself (he often identified with Narcissus) and, like Miniver Cheevy, “thought and thought and thought about it.” He filled up thousands of pages of notebooks with musings on every conceivable subject, but was fascinated by nothing so much as the operations of his own consciousness, which he dreamed of purifying and isolating much as Mallarmé had purified and isolated the language of poetry; an impossible dream of course, which led him not to any grand theory but to write his great novel of aloof introspection, Monsieur Teste. Unlike Mallarmé, Valéry came to see poetry not as an end in itself but as an intellectual exercise or experiment by which to test and research the capacities of the creative mind– the act of writing of a poem, not the poem itself, became the object of his fascination. It was this Copernican reorientation which allowed him to finally begin writing verse once more.
In Valéry, we find the apotheosis of the paradoxical Poean ideal: the poet as cold, sober, and rigorous intellect, heroically wresting from the vagaries of language the perfect combination of words, the perfect linguistic apparatus, by which to induce ineffable, Dionysian ecstasies in the reader. Indeed, for a Symbolist-cum-rationalist like Valéry, the sublime is the only acceptable emotion for poetry to evoke– all lesser sentiment is interdit. In a preface he wrote: “The calculation of drawing tears, of melting hearts…. makes me pitiless. Emotion seems to me a forbidden means. To make someone weak is an ignoble act.” By contrast: “If an architecture which resembles nothing of man brings you to the brink of tears, this dawning effusion that you feel struggling out of your incomprehensible depths is of infinite value, for it teaches you that you are sensitive to objects entirely indifferent and useless to your person, to all the matters and circumstances that circumscribe you as a mortal being.” This is the fetishization of Kantian disinterest taken to its ultimate artistic conclusion.
However, like his contemporary T.S. Eliot, Valéry was a poet-critic whose ostensible views were often at odds with his poetry. Following Mallarmé, he often claimed that a poem ought to strive for purely formal-linguistic enchantment, purged of all the “idols” of subject matter; and yet, the very best of his poems, especially the poems of his maturity, are precisely those which move beyond Mallarmean obliquity and soundplay to embrace a new synthesis of sound and sense, possessing both the suggestive verbal power of Symbolism and the lyrical contemplation of ideas. Though theoretically convinced that poetry was an inappropriate vehicle for the search for philosophic truth– he would have compared attempting both at once to, say, trying to ballet dance your way to the top of a mountain– his immortal poems are those which draw as much on his capacity for articulating spiritual ideas as his logomantic efforts to conjure the spiritual Ideal.
As an example, we might consider his “Sketch of a Serpent,” which the notoriously unforgiving Yvor Winters considered the greatest lyric poem of the 20th century. In this poem, a soliloquy by Satan in serpent form, Valéry not only creates a compellingly grandiose, luxurious, and wretched voice of evil, but takes the opportunity to engage in some tragicomic, philosophical self-parody. The serpent exemplifies Valéry’s obsession with rarified mental activity (à la Monsieur Teste) taken to its gnostic extreme. Satan loathes God for causing pure cosmic contemplation to “fall” into action, diversity, and materiality, despite clearly delighting in himself and his reptile form (the description of which was inspired, no doubt, by Leconte’s aboma) and being seduced by (as he seduces) the hyper-sensual Eve. Of the creation of the world, he complains (here in Nathaniel Rudovsky-Brody’s accurate but blank translation):
O Vanity! First Cause! The One
Whose kingdom is in Heaven
Spoke with a voice that was the light
And lo, the universe spread wide.
As if his own pure pageantry
Went on too long, God broke the bar
Himself of his perfect eternity,
And became the One who dissipates
His Principle in consequences,
His Unity in stars.
Heaven, his error! Time, his ruin!
And the gaping animal abyss!
What a fall at the origin shines out
In place of emptiness!
Yet the first pronouncement of his Word
Was ME!... The proudest of the stars
That were madly spoken into being,
I am… will be… I illuminate
With all seduction’s blazing lights
The divine diminishment!
The serpent’s pride is paradoxically founded on what he laments as a metaphysical “error.” His entire sense of self is therefore continuously and self-consciously undermined, rendering him absurd: He sees himself as an imperfection, and therefore loathes God for creating him, but also relishes the fact that he is the first and greatest of God’s imperfections. He seeks fulfillment by exacting revenge against God, yet it is his sense of grievance which causes his lack of fulfillment in the first place. Like the Satan of Paradise Lost, though in a different way, the serpent extravagantly perpetuates his own misery. On top of this, he proves, in his weakness for lush sensuality, to be an intellectual hypocrite. The poem is a tour de force in itself, but those familiar with Valéry’s life and work will also see the painful self-knowledge being worked out within it.
I would be remiss not to briefly touch on what is undoubtedly Valéry’s most famous poem, and possibly the most famous French poem of the 20th century, “The Graveyard By the Sea.” This exquisite meditation on mortality is a perfect example of a poem that does not exactly tread new ground (its “moral” is encapsulated in its two-line epigraph from Pindar) , but nevertheless manages to vividly articulate the pathos of death-consciousness in fresh terms. Of the thrill in living accessible only to those who know they will die, he says:
As fruit dissolves in consummation,
As it transforms its absence to delight
When in a mouth its form is lost and dies,
I breathe the smoke I will become
And the sky sings, of shores transformed
To rumor, to the soul that is consumed.
As with Racine, we must bear in mind that in Valéry we are dealing with one of the apex masters of the French language, of its sound and versecraft, and so as beautiful as a translation is, it can but faintly echo the grandeur of the original. Of the particularly dreadful resonance that impending death rings for those convinced of their own potential, we read:
For me alone, in me, and mine alone,
Close to the heart, the wellsprings of the poem,
Between the chasm and the pure event,
I wait to hear that dark and bitter well,
My inner greatness, echoing in my soul,
Its ever-future emptiness!
And, addressing his own gnostic tendency, his own urge to escape the life of the senses to which he is inextricably tied, Valéry scolds:
And you, great soul, are you waiting for a dream
That will be truer than these lying colors
Created by surf and gold for eyes of flesh?
So will you sing, when you are light as air?
All flies! Life washes through my presence,
Saintly impatience also dies!
There is no beauty without senses to perceive it; without a throat of flesh encasing the fugitive breath, one cannot sing. Mystical impatience to ascend to a higher state is but one more phase of the soul’s development, and not the ultimate wisdom.
His novel, plays, philosophical dialogues, and endless notebooks, letters, and essays aside, if Valéry had written only these two aforementioned poems, he would have secured a legacy for himself. As it was, his poetic oeuvre was indeed very slim, but he wrote several other lyric masterpieces as well, including “The Pythia,” “The Canticle of the Columns,” and his longest poem, the oneiric, Mallarmean recitative, “The Young Fate.” In his Faustian striving after artistic perfection, intellectual power, and scientific knowledge (like the Faustian Goethe), Valéry carved out one of the most singular bodies of work ever seen in any language, and, caught between dueling impulses to emulate the lofty, precise classicism of Racine (or Gluck in music), and the vague spellcasting of Mallarmé (or Wagner in music), he produced a poetry which feels thoroughly ancient and modern simultaneously. He stands beside figures like Rilke and Wallace Stevens, both of whom were deeply influenced by him, as one of the major poets of the early 20th century.
À Bientôt
And now, mon lecteur, I’m afraid I must bring our petite odyssée to its end, though I hope this is only the beginning of your French voyage– you must visit your sister often! There is so much I have neglected to touch on, not only in the history of French poetry (much less French literature), but even concerning the poets and poems I have featured here. I am dazzled by an embarrassment of riches. I have not, for instance, had the space to say much at all about forms and versification, much as I would have enjoyed delving into this subject (for those who are curious: seek out Jacques Barzun’s An Essay On French Verse). Alas, night falls, and our bateau ivre enters the harbor. We are now back in Paris, the City of Light: the lutetian limestone of palaces, monuments, and boulevards glow in the light of bronze lanterns, and the Seine reflects these and the other stars.
This essay was solicited by our George Steiner Editor of Poetry and Criticism, Amit Majmudar.
Elijah Perseus Blumov is a poet, critic, and the host of the poetry analysis podcast, Versecraft. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming from periodicals such as Literary Matters, Birmingham Poetry Review, Think Journal, The Alabama Literary Review, and The Classical Outlook.
