The Quarrel of the "Vowels"

Abstract

work has been assimilated by its readers within the generic idealism of the lyrical tradition extending from Romanticism to Symbolism, the two limits of nineteenth-century French poetry. Starting with Marcel Raymond's important history of modern French lyricism, De Baudelaire au Surrealisme (1933), Rimbaud's poetry has been commonly perceived as occupying a major, and often pivotal place in the nationalistic continuum of the French language and its literary tradition. M. Raymond actually grants the young poet a high standing in the pantheon of what may be called the Symbolist Company. He begins his influential study of modern French poetry by tracing the sources vives du mouvement poetique contemporain to a branching out of the tradition at the start of the 1850's, establishing Baudelaire and Rimbaud as the two major heralds of lyrical modernity. But the deeper origin of modern poetry, according to Raymond, should be seen in the way nineteenth-century poetic activity took over, after the Enlightenment's critique of superstition, the role faith and the church once played in managing man's relationship to the unknown and the irrational. II appartenait a l'art (mais non a lui seul) de satisfaire a quelques-unes des exigences humaines que la religion, jusque-la, avait reussi a exor-