'Poetry will no longer keep in time with action; it will be ahead of it.' Arthur Rimbaud The active and colourful lives of the poets of nineteenth-century France are reflected in the diversity and vibrancy of their works. At once sacred and profane, passionate and satirical, these remarkable and innovative poems explore the complexities of human emotion and ponder the great questions of religion and art. They form as rich a body of work as any one age and language has ever produced. This unique anthology includes generous selections from the six nineteenth-century French poets most often read in the English-speaking world today: Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Modern translations are printed opposite the original French verse, and the edition contains over a thousand lines of poetry never previously translated into English.

This volume of essays, written by scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints, presents a fresh approach to the study of nineteenth-century French poetry. Each of the eleven essays, on different poets from Lamartine to Mallarmé and Laforgue, focuses on the detailed organisation of a single poem. The method of close reading has been adopted in order to effect an introduction to the analysis of the 'basics' of poetic language (sound, metre, syntax, etc.), and in order to explore and illustrate some of the claims and arguments about poetry arising from developments in the prevailing literary theory. Theoretical positions are posed and tested in the terms of practical analysis and interpretation. Christopher Prendergast's introduction to the volume situates the essays in a series of general perspectives and contexts, and Clive Scott has provided an appendix on French versification.

From Sade at one end of the nineteenth century to Freud at the other, via many French novelists and poets, pleasure and pain become ever more closely entwined. Whereas the inseparability of these themes has hitherto been studied from isolated perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, sadism and sado-masochism, melancholy, or post-structuralist textualjouissance, the originality of this collaborative volume lies in its exploration of how pleasure and pain function across a broader range of contexts. The essays collected here demonstrate how the complex relationship between pleasure and pain plays a vital role in structuring nineteenth-century thinking in prose fiction (Balzac, Flaubert, Musset, Maupassant, Zola), verse and the memoir as well as socio-cultural studies, medical discourses, aesthetic theory and the visual arts. Featuring an international selection of contributors representing the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies – historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and sociopolitical – the volume attests to the vitality, coherence and interdisciplinarity of nineteenth-century French studies and will be of interest to a wide cross-section of scholars and students of French literature, society and culture.

This collection illuminates the uniquely fascinating era between 1820 and 1950 in French poetry - a time in which diverse aesthetic ideas conflicted and converged as poetic forms evolved at an astonishing pace. It includes generous selections from all the established giants - among them Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Breton - as well as works from a wide variety of less well-known poets such as Claudel and Cendrars, whose innovations proved vital to the progress of poetry in France. The significant literary schools of the time are also represented in sections focusing on such movements as Romanticism, Symbolism, Cubism and Surrealism. Eloquent and inspirational, this rich and exhilarating anthology reveals an era of exceptional vitality.

"Original texts and translations are presented on facing pages, allowing readers to appreciate the vigor and variety of the French and the fidelity of the English versions. Divided into three chronological sections spanning the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the volume includes introductory essays by noted scholars of each era's poetry along with biographical sketches and bibliographical references for each poet."--BOOK JACKET.

This book offers a comprehensive description of how writers, in particular poets in nineteenth-century France, became increasingly aware of the visual element in writing from the point of view both of content and of the formal organisation of the words in the text. This interest encouraged writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud to recreate in language some of the vivid, sensual impact of the graphic or painterly image. This was to be achieved by organising texts according to aesthetic criteria so that as far as possible the form of the text as visually perceived would be closely interrelated to its content as reconstructed through the reading process. The result of this development was a radical redefinition of the scope and function of poetry, raising important general questions about the nature of the relationship between language and the visual image that are still very much of concern today.