Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Paul Verlaine's "The Art of Poetry; To Charles Morice" serves as a poetic manifesto for the Symbolist movement, a guide to crafting verses that hover in a state of ethereal ambiguity. He opens with a strong call for music as the guiding principle of poetry: "Music must be paramount." Verlaine's focus on the musicality of verse suggests a poetic landscape not confined to rigid meters or structures, but one that flows and adapts, much like a melody.

The counsel to adopt an "Uneven Rhythm" supports this ideal, emphasizing the need for a cadence that is "more indefinite, more soluble in air." These lines encapsulate the essence of Symbolist poetry, which seeks to elevate the abstract and the indefinite over the concrete. To Verlaine, this is the art of turning words into echoes, making the intangible tangible through the delicacy of language.

His preference for "words without ambiguity" might at first seem counterintuitive to a call for indefiniteness. However, Verlaine is advocating for clarity in the vehicle, but ambiguity in the tenor of the metaphor. He calls for a "hazy song / Where Vagueness and Precision join," an elegantly paradoxical combination that encapsulates his vision. It's a call to maintain a sense of vagueness in the poetic image, but a precision in the choice of words that bring that image to life.

This dance of clarity and ambiguity extends to the poem's imagery: "eyes beautiful and veiled," "quivering light of high noon," and "a blue confusion of bright stars." Each of these descriptions illustrates Verlaine's poetic principle of nuance, blending light with shadow, clarity with mystery, in a manner that avoids absolutes. He makes it explicit that it is "Nuance" and not "Color" that we should strive for. In a world often driven by stark contrasts and hard lines, Verlaine calls for a different type of observation, one that unites "Dream to dream and flute to horn," a uniting of realms often kept separate, whether they be emotional, artistic, or conceptual.

Critically, Verlaine warns against certain pitfalls in the art of versification, including "deadly Jest," "cruel Wit," and "impure Laughter." Such tones, he contends, only serve to degrade poetry, reducing it to "this garlic of low-class kitchens." Similarly, he criticizes the limitations of conventional rhyme schemes, suggesting that an overemphasis on rhyme can lead to artificiality, a jingling triviality.

Ending with the invocation "Music, always more music," Verlaine pushes for a kind of poetry that transcends the literal and the concrete. His "good-luck charm" is a metaphor for the kind of poetry he advocates: unpredictable, indeterminate, yet richly sensory, filled with the "smell of mint and thyme."

This piece is not just a commentary on the art of poetry; it's a challenge to future poets. Verlaine, in no uncertain terms, guides us towards a poetic realm where ambiguity is celebrated, where words are more than their dictionary definitions, and where the musicality of language reigns supreme. "And everything else," he declares, "is mere literature," relegating all that does not meet his criteria to a realm of insignificance. With these lines, Verlaine challenges the status quo, urging poets toward a practice that defies easy categorization and beckons from the misty borders of the unspeakable.

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