Poésie et musique chez Baudelaire et Verlaine

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between poetry and music using Baudelaire’s examination of Richard Wagner’s music as an example. Starting from the question of the ‘translatability’ of music into language, which Baudelaire himself poses on the basis of the Lohengrin prelude, the article fundamentally questions the possibility of an association between the two arts, arguing that such an association, if it does not want to remain purely metaphorical, seems possible at best in the area of a ‘contact zone’, in which the logical-semantic references recede into the background or assume a high degree of generality, while at the same time formal structures can be designed in such a way that the abstract statements are thereby ‘represented’. This is illustrated by the example of two poems by
Baudelaire (“La musique”) and Verlaine (from Romances sans paroles).