Music and Poetry in France from Baudelaire to Mallarmé

Book excerpt: The book assesses the influence of music on the ideas and poetic practice of a number of late nineteenth-century poets. Particular attention is paid to the effect that the musical model supposedly had on the traditional ways of writing poetry, especially in the key areas of rhythm, sound-repetition and imagery. The chapters on Baudelaire and Mallarme relate their ideas on music to their more general theories of art and poetry and at the same time provide a suitable framework for a critical and evaluative discussion of the Symbolist poets' contribution to the music-poetry debate in the 1880s and 1890s."