Modern poetry

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches modern poetry mainly through Baudelaire. He reads Harmonie du soir against La Cloche fêlée: this poem tells no story and lines up sensations rather than feelings. Its line "the sun has drowned in its own congealing blood" halts the twilight, the figure of an Occident that is never slain, which he links to Hegel's owl of Minerva. He sees in it the expression of a historical moment, modernity, which he identifies with Romanticism and with the end of the substantial world. He then traces the formation of an "inner landscape". In Hölderlin, the scenery fades away and the poet's word takes over from religion. In Rimbaud, against Baudelaire's artificialism, nature returns in the form of sensations. In Rilke, the internalised landscape is given back through speech. In 2025, speaking about perfumes, he returns to Parfum exotique and L'Invitation au voyage. For him, Symbolism, contemporary with Impressionism, rests on sensation and on a metaphysics of escape; poetic modernity prefers the vague to the finished beauty of the Greeks1.

1. 1Flagrante Delights27 May 2025

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.