Neo-Symbolism and renewal

Poetic modernity may be traced back to and even beyond Charles Baudelaire's searing paradoxes or Gustave Flaubert's clinical ironies, Stéphane Mallarmé's retreat into textual interiorities or Arthur Rimbaud's abandonment of self-illumination, via his flight to Abyssinia and the recognition of the failure of his poetic enterprise. Twentieth-century poetic modernity ushers itself in with a mixture of relatively silken-smooth post-Symbolist manners and rather more jarring or vigorously rethought modes that prefigure both Cubist and Surrealist preoccupations. The principal figures on this early stage are nine in number: Valéry, Claudel, Segalen, Péguy and Perse, Apollinaire, Cendrars and Reverdy, and one often misunderstood woman, admired by Apollinaire and Cocteau and the friend of Colette and Proust: Anna de Noailles.

Paul Claudel's work as a whole is marked by a spiritual questing that conveys itself sometimes in surging lyrical, hymnal modes, sometimes in rather more emotionally taut tonalities to which the elastic and free-flowing verset claudélien (Claudelian verset) or a poetically dramatised prose form bring suppleness and renewed rhythm. Connaissance de l'Est (Knowledge of the East, 1900) offers a set of discreetly narrative/ descriptive and contemplative and emotionally charged prose poems that caress the natural and human phenomena of a distant world, that of the Far East.