BOOK REVIEW BY AN ANONYMOUS BRITISH REVIEWER
IN THE TIMES
An Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Valéry, in English Translation. Edited by Angel Flores. Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.
After due consideration,
I tried reading a translation
Of French poets from Nerval to Valéry;
And although the Gallic nation
Holds them all in veneration,
I confess that they are not my cup of tea.
Why, it’s as dreadful as the antics
Of the German High Romantics,
And they go about as far—about as deep
In that dark and bulgy wood
Where the moonlight drips like blood
Among trees that clutch at you and creep,
And where flowers that devour
Yawn open by the hour,
And monsters pursue you, and weep.
They were all full of spleen,
If you know what I mean,
And if you read the volume you will see
Forty stanzas of angoisse
Ladled out like vichyssoise
As the entrée to a long course of ennui;
And the endless, sad complainte
That the living are all dead
In the head,
And the dead …
really ain’t.
And their stories: Jules Laforgue
Ended up inside a morgue—
Couldn’t pay for a burial place;
And Stephan Mallarmé
Faded mystically away,
Like his symbols, into some inner space.
Enter Evil: Charles Baudelaire,
Who proclaimed himself the Heir
Of the Devil, after reading Edgar-Poe;
Worst of all, Paul Verlaine,
Like Van Gogh, went insane,
And tried to kill his lover Rimbaud.
(Save for jaunty, debonair
Prince Guillaume Apollinaire,
They are really not the sort you’d want to know.)
Now Baudelaire may have been
Quite a specialist in Sin,
And Rimbaud as Rambonctious as could be,
But after reading this anthology
I can say without apology,
It offers no Illuminations for me.
Author's Note:
The Reader, like the Author, should consider himself free
To side with the Reviewer, or with les poètes maudits.
