Verlaine's “Art Poétique” Re-Examined

Abstract

Verlaine may be one of the least intellectual of French poets, yet his “Art poétique” finds its way regularly into anthologies of French literature as the perfect symbolist counterpart of Gautier's “L'art,” the manifesto Of the Parnassians. “De la musique avant toute chose” is the advertised motto of the symbolist school of the eighties and nineties, just as the marmorean ideal was of the Parnassians of the sixties and seventies, indeed of Verlaine himself in the Poèmes saturniens (“Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?”). As in the case of any such well-worn document, there are two points of view from which it may be studied: (1) the intent of the creator of the document and (2) the overlay of interpretation which has developed around it. Let us attempt to render service to Verlaine by trying to determine his own meaning, through close examination of this and other works of the poet, as distinct from the meaning which his followers and associates read into this little “chanson.”