French Literature Reviews - 2026

Yann Frémy, Verlaine: Speech or Oblivion
Poetry and Poetics

Yann Frémy, Verlaine: Speech or Oblivion

Publisher: Academia (Ref.: 20085)

ISBN: 9782806100856

Pages: 187

Price: 22€ - 24€ outside Belgium and France

Although his reputation scarcely reflects it, Verlaine was a poet of tremendous energy. When Rimbaud met him in 1871, the author of Poèmes saturniens, Fêtes galantes, and La Bonne Chanson was at the height of his personal, poetic, and political powers. Yet an inner flaw constantly threatened him. Within him lay—and had always lain—a fundamental anxiety: a terror linked to the perpetual possibility of absence, which he would go so far as to describe as none other than "Hell." In this poet, despite his absolute mastery of his intellectual and poetic faculties, a continuous reversal takes place, turning presence into absence, deficiency, and defection. From Des Amies to Amour, this essay examines how Verlaine's poetic voice, at once flamboyant and melancholic, expresses, conveys, sustains, and struggles against the oblivion that hounds man at every turn.

Yann Frémy is co-editor-in-chief of Parade sauvage and the Revue Verlaine. He is the author of "Te voilà, c'est la force". Essai sur Une Saison en enfer (Classiques Garnier, 2009) and has edited the volume "Forces de Verlaine" (Revue des sciences humaines, 1/2007). Co-director of the Verlaine/Rimbaud seminar (Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle), he is an associate member of the CERIEL research group at the University of Strasbourg.

Paul Verlaine remains a central figure in late nineteenth-century French poetry, often associated with the Symbolist movement and the development of musicality in verse. His transition from the Parnassian style of Poèmes saturniens to more nuanced, impressionistic tones reflects a broader shift in the aesthetic priorities of the era. The study of modern lyricism often explores the tension between creative expression and the threat of erasure.

This essay examines how Verlaine's poetic voice, at once flamboyant and melancholic, expresses, conveys, sustains, and struggles against the oblivion that hounds man at every turn. It traces this development from Des Amies to Amour, focusing on the poet's struggle against an inner anxiety he described as a fundamental absence. Readers interested in the intersection of biography and formal poetic analysis may find this investigation of Verlaine's internal conflicts and thematic preoccupations relevant to their research.