ABSTRACT
‘Qui lit, qui connaît encore Banville?’. 1 So begins a short essay of 2002 by Jérôme Vérain which confronts from the outset a crucial question facing the small number of scholars to have worked on Banville. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the outlook was bleak. In 1935, Pierre Martino writes of the Odes funambulesques, ‘On ne le lit plus guère, semble-t-il, aujourd’hui’, and seven years later Eileen Souffrin opens her critical edition of Les Stalactites with the ominous words: ‘De nos jours la gloire de Banville est sur son déclin’. 2 By the mid-twentieth century, Banville seemed doomed to remain on the margins of academic inquiry while the influential post-Romantic iconoclasts Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé continued to dominate our vision of nineteenth-century French poetry. During the 1980s, however, interest in Banville enjoyed a modest but steady resurgence, the general tone of which tended towards evangelical enthusiasm struggling against either suspicion or general indifference. 3 Philippe Andrès, the most energetic of Banville’s loyal supporters, and author of four of barely a dozen monographs devoted to him over the last hundred years, protests in 1997 against ‘un injuste oubli’, exclaiming: ‘Tant d’admiration, de respect et d’éloges de la part des plus grands poètes du dix-neuvième siècle! Qu’a-t-il pu devenir, ce Banville tant fêté et loué de ses contemporains? Comment a-t-on pu oublier si longtemps ce poète des poètes?’. 4 In her landmark study Hellénismes de Banville, the most thorough and important reading of Banville for many decades, Myriam Robic argues, ‘Nous assistons […] à une véritable réhabilitation de l’œuvre de Banville après une longue période d’oubli’. 5 I hope that this study of the multiple complexities of Banville’s aesthetic theory and poetic practice will do more than simply add yet another voice to those who have for the last thirty years been striving for his rediscovery, as Alvin Harms warns that ‘One of the dangers in preparing a book on a writer who is not well known is the temptation to become a crusader on his behalf’. 6 It is quite astonishing, however, that the study of nineteenth-century French literature, and poetry in particular, could have continued to marginalize Banville for so long when his writing illuminates our understanding of aesthetics, and the myriad pleasures and pitfalls of verse poetry, in so many provocative and challenging ways.
