Theodore De Banville

This book explores how Theodore de Banville's remarkably coherent body of verse theory and practice, shaped debates about poetic value and how to identify it during a period of aesthetic uncertainty caused by diverse social, economic, political and artistic factors. Introduction: Verse in an Age of Science and Industry 1. The Music and the Mechanism: Theorizing the Unanalysable 2. The Silent Music of the Stars 3. The Poetics of (Self-)Parody: Odes funambulesques 4. Bringing the Past to Life: Resuscitating Fixed Forms and the National Canon, or la cheville glorifiee 5. Epilogue: The Poetry Factory: On the Meaning of Form, from the Grands Rhétoriqueurs to the OuLiPo, via Dada