The Background of Modern French Poetry
Essays and Interviews

This book explores the nature of literary influence in literary creation, as well as aspects of French poetry after Baudelaire.

P. Mansell Jones (Author)

9780521133999, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 April 2011

210 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.2 cm, 0.27 kg

Originally published in 1951, this book explores the nature of literary influence, and its part in literary creation, as found at work in some aspects of French poetry after Baudelaire. Part I contains an essay on Swedenborg and Baudelaire, an essay on Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarné, a third on the 'imposing but frequently miscalculated effects' of Baudelaire's discovery of Poe and a fourth on Whitman and the Symbolists. Part II is concerned with prosody, and contains four essays entitled 'From poetic prose to the prose-poem'; 'the development of the vers libéré; 'the first theory of vers libre'; 'Whitman and the origins of the vers libre'. With these eight essays are reprinted the vivid accounts of personal interviews which the author had as a young man more than thirty years before publication - when he first began to investigate the problems discussed in these essays - with the post-Symbolist poets.

Preface
Part I. Three Major Influences: 1. Swedenborg, Baudelaire and their intermediaries
2. Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé: a problem of literary judgement
3. Poe and Baudelaire: the 'affinity'
4. Whitman and the Symbolists
Part II. The Emergence of the Vers Libre
5. From poetical prose to the prose-poem
6. The vers libéré
7. The first theory of the vers libre
8. Whitman and the origins of the vers libre
9. Talks with French poets in 1913–1914
Bibliographies
Index to proper names
Index to periodicals.

Subject Areas: Educational: English language & literacy [YQC]