ABSTRACT
First published in instalments with the Écho de la Sorbonne, moniteur de l’enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles, in 1870–1871, then as a single volume both in 1872 and with Charpentier in 1881, Banville’s Petit Traité de poésie française frequently appears in studies of nineteenth-century French poetry as a sort of reference work whenever questions of versification arise. 1 It seems to have been taken primarily as a didactic text, since its original readership was the schoolchildren for whose edification the Écho de la Sorbonne was intended, and Banville himself claims in chapter 9, ‘je dois me souvenir que j’écris un manuel d’écolier et non un livre de critique’. 2 Max Fuchs confirms that ‘ce livre est en réalité presque exclusivement scolaire’, and Léon Valade, reviewing it for La Renaissance in 1873, writes appreciatively of a guide ‘où les plus novices ouvriers du vers peuvent s’initier rapidement à toutes les habiletés de la forme. Une prosodie écrite par un poète, cela est précieux autant que nouveau! — Parfait artiste et théoricien consommé’. 3 Sandra W. Dolbau, in her Dictionary of Modern French Literature, suggests that the Petit Traité has been considered ‘a valuable handbook on Parnassian poetry, mainly for its praise of Hugo, though it was poorly received by Leconte de Lisle and others’, while Levi’s Guide to French Literature claims that ‘The treatise on versification is primarily of interest for the stress it lays on rich rhymes and its view of poetry as syntactically correct organization of sound patterns’. 4 Brian Rigby, however, in the New Oxford Companion to French Literature, calls the Petit Traité, with a generosity rare among readers of Banville, ‘perhaps the single most impressive exposition of the forms and techniques of French poetry’. 5
