sonnets

Question 1

what did gautier want to become and why was this important?

Answer 1

poet or painting, choosing poetry, he incorporated lots of artist imagery into his poems

Question 2

what was a key philosophy in 19th cent. french parnassianism (which developed into symbolism)

Answer 2

art for arts sake, rather than didatic/ moralising art

Question 3

what does art for arts sake argue?

Answer 3

• art in itself has its own principal of morality.
• a piece of art without a moralising purpose has a stronger moralising power than one that didnt
• morality is in the form of art NOT its subject matter

Question 4

what is a notable feature of Baudelaire’s poetry (s)

Answer 4

structure: one of his principle passions is the passion for order, for symmetry and for sculpture

Question 5

what does Baudelaire consider a poem to be

Answer 5

the discipline of form imposed upon emotion and experience and thought

Question 6

Baudelaire on order/ disorder

Answer 6

-one of the first modern poets to be aware of disorder in the world and in himself

Question 7

what does Baudelaire like to focus upon

Answer 7

-attitudes to the dandy, attraction to the unhealthy and the morbid, scorn, provocation

Question 8

how did Baudelaire different from other poets?

Answer 8

• whereas traditionally in poetry the symbolism used was fairly homogenous, oceans= sadness, fire of love etc, he chose to focus on different things
• Baudelaire’s art involved making something which wasn’t typically beautiful magnificent:

Question 9

what stage of life was particularly important for Baudelaire?

Answer 9

• childhood: he had an extremely close relationship with his mother
• poetry allows you to recover the joys of childhoood

Question 10

what is an alexandrine form?

Answer 10

• rhymically made up out of 12 beats, with a hemistitch in the middle
• four stressed syllables per line, 1 at the end, one before the caesura. The others vary
• two quatrains followed by two tercets
• rhyme scheme typically: abba, abbba, cdc dee

Question 11

what is rime plat, croissee, embracee?

Answer 11

plat: rhyming couplets
croissee: ABAB
embracee: ABBA

Question 12

key difference between gautier and baudelaire?

Answer 12

Gautier: restrict the poets role as a maker, making them a spectator of the visible world. Gautier was a sculpture of words
Baudelaire: poet is actively experiencing things, they find their own meanings

Question 13

what happens in spleen pluviose

Answer 13

• Paris and the poet’s room are the site of transformations and substitutions
• dead in the cemetery receive the rain , soul of dead poet roams the rooftops, smoking log wheezes, dirty pack of cards talk about a former passion
• life and death are seen as merged or confused . Inanimate objects are given human characteristics

Question 14

what is Baudelaire’s spleen?

Answer 14

• Baudelaire entitled the first and largest section of his anthology fleurs du mal Spleen
• In this context, spleen depicts something much more like clinical depression or psychosis (as a result of perceived inadequacies) rather than a world-weariness

Question 15

what does the journey into Baudelaire’s spleen involve?

and what can this be connected to

Answer 15

• a decent into a kind of no mans land, the intermediate between life and death in which objects are anthropomorphised and the poet is depersonalised in a series of lucid self-explorations

Question 16

what is the allegorical figure in spleen

Answer 16

• a figure pouring water, which can be seen as a destructive allegorical force
• pluviose and spleen combine to destruct reality

Question 17

who are the dialougic figures in pluviose and what do thye tal abou

Answer 17

Jack of Hearts and Queen of Spades, they come from a dirty pack of cards and discuss lost love affairs grimly

Question 18

quick summary of Rimbaud’s life

Answer 18

• started writing at a very young age
• ran away from home during the franco prussian war
• completely stopped writing at 21 years.

Question 19

what movement did rimbaud belong to/ what did he influence

Answer 19

symbolism, but influenced many surrealists

Question 20

what are key features of his poetry/ thought

Answer 20

• find a new language (often by radically re-imagining language)
• revolt against everything which is order
• language loses its referential purpose and becomes a series of sounds
• un rhetorique de silence
• l’alchemie du verbe

Question 21

what was verlaines aim?

Answer 21

he wanted to be recognised as a poet who continued the tradition begun by Rimbaud

Question 22

Verlaine context (rebellous)

Answer 22

• escaped form school
• deserted his wife and young child
• lived and travelled with Rimbaud and they had an affair
• he shot Rimbaud

Question 23

what is the importance of la decadence?

Answer 23

• began in the Satiricon: Petronius speaks of the vices of a civilisation taht si celebratign its gradual death
• in many of Verlaines poems, melacholy as a disease is almost a philosophical theme
• Verlaine, inspired by Baudelaire, was obsessed with depicting the morbid, the obscene, and the perverse