Verlaine

Summary

Dominique Pagani returns above all to the "Art poétique", which he reads as the manifesto of symbolism and of modern poetry: "Music before all else", an almost immaterial art, "with nothing in it that weighs or poses", which erases the visual. He takes from it the preference for the odd-numbered line, more musical because it escapes the symmetry of gravity1, and the nuance that betroths "the flute to the horn", which he reads as a way of thinking about timbre2. He points out that joining the vague to the precise does not mean giving up all structure3. He links this verse to Wagner and to Carmen, and places Verlaine in the line of Baudelaire, as the starting point of symbolist fluidity. He also reads "Charleroi" as a poem of the industrial revolution, and quotes "Il pleure dans mon cœur" on sorrow without cause and "Clair de lune" on victorious love sung in the minor mode. He speaks of a calculated naivety4 and mentions the harsh portrait Rimbaud gives of him in "A Season in Hell".

1. 1#18 What is musical in music25 Mar 2021 · 1:03:01
2. 2#8 Happiness and unhappiness in music11 Jan 2021 · 1:21:42
3. 3Flagrante Delights27 May 2025 · 13:33
4. 4#2 From Lévi-Strauss to Nerval, on music3 Dec 2020 · 1:42:05

Summary produced automatically from 55 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.