Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) was a prolific poet, dramatist, critic and prose fiction writer whose significant contribution to poetic and aesthetic debates in nineteenth-century France has long been overlooked. Despite his profound influence on major writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarme, Banville polarised critical opinion throughout his fifty-year career. While supporters championed him as a virtuoso of French verse, many critics dismissed his formal pyrotechnics, effervescent rhythms and extravagant rhymes as mere clowning. This book explores how Banville's remarkably coherent body of verse theory and practice, full of provocative energy and mischievous humour, shaped debates about poetic value and how to identify it during a period of aesthetic uncertainty caused by diverse social, economic, political and artistic factors. It features a detailed new reading of Banville's most infamous and misunderstood text, the Petit Traitede poesie francaise, as well as extended analyses of verse collections such as Les Stalactites, Odes funambulesques, Les Exiles, Trente-six Ballades and Rondels, illuminated by wide reference to Banville's plays, fiction and journalism. Evans elucidates not only aesthetic tensions at the heart of nineteenth-century French verse, but also a centuries-old tension between verse mechanisms and an unquantifiable, mysterious and elusive poeticity which emerges as one of the defining narratives of poetic value from the Middle Ages, via the Grands Rhetoriqueurs and Dada, to the experiments of the OuLiPo and beyond.

Critical biography of Théodore de Banville, a French poet and writer.

Critical biography of Théodore de Banville, a French poet and writer.

A creative innovator who boldly traversed traditional boundaries separating different genres and schools, French poet Theophile Gautier was extremely influential, playing a role in shaping the styles of poets from T. S. Elliot to Ezra Pound. In this, his most acclaimed collection of verse, Gautier offers his philosophical ponderings and lyrical musings.

A study of Charles Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris (1859) that explores how the practice of reading prose poems might be different from reading poetry in verse, illustrating how Baudelaire wrote texts that he considered poems and how this form shows aspects of his poetic modernity.

Robert T. Denommé, who has written ex­tensively on French literature, here offers a companion volume to his Nineteenth­-Century French Romantic Poets, previ­ously published in this series. Once again working within an historical, philosophi­cal, and aesthetic context, he provides a wealth of critical insights for the general reader as well as the specialist. His first chapter surveys the evolution of poetic expression in France, and succeeding chapters study the major poets--Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Leconte de Lisle, and José-Maria de He­redia. Incisive and concise, the book provides a good general introduction to, and a long-overdue reassessment of, French Par­nassianism.