In May 1873 Verlaine wrote of a plan to compose a new volume of poems, ‘according to a system I’m working out. It will be very musical.’ A year later, in prison in Mons, he wrote the poem that has become one of the great documents—and the great clichés—of the mélodie. ‘Art poétique’ was to prove a gift to the music critics of the early 1900s, a pillar of the public narratives of French art song that they were then beginning to construct, and which this chapter explores. In a lecture given at Le Havre (and subsequently in Paris) in 1906, Georges Jean-Aubry declared, ‘The history of the lied in France, even if considered only in its musical aspect, could not be written without the name and the works of Paul Verlaine.’ Reprinted as an article, Jean- Aubry's lecture, ‘Verlaine et la musique contemporaine’, was headed ‘De la musique avant toute chose / De la musique encore et toujours’.

It is hardly surprising that critics found in ‘Art poétique’ both a metaphor and an origin story for French song, for by the early 1900s Verlaine had become almost synonymous with contemporary mélodie. From a steady trickle in the mid-1880s, settings of his poetry had swelled to a tide in the 1890s and a flood in the 1900s: between 1902 and 1907 Verlaine settings by more than sixty composers were published in Paris alone. Little wonder that Louis Piérard, reviewing a concert given by La Libre esthétique in Brussels in 1908, wearily invoked ‘Art poétique’ as he listed the evening's songs: ‘du Verlaine, encore du Verlaine, toujours du Verlaine …’ It is small wonder, too, that this glut prompted an inverse critical response in some quarters, a reactionary dismissal of Verlaine's technique and a condemnation of his deleterious effect on contemporary music-making.