Haiku-Verlaine

This chapter argues that Verlaine is as close as we have to a French haiku-poet. His most famous poems present almost no narrative, they prioritise landscapes or settings, they search for (and produce) mostly non-dramatic forms of entanglement between settings and subjectivities. The chapter draws on Roland Barthes’s writings about haikus, which allow the presentation of two key concepts in 21st Century Symbolism . The first is individuation : instead of thinking about ourselves as individuals, we should think of ourselves as dynamic systems, as ongoing processes of individuation. The second key concept is practice : the idea that haikus (and Verlaine’s poetry) can be understood as meditative exercises in which we experience our entanglement in the world. The chapter suggests that Verlaine’s haiku-like poetry must be viewed as an ‘ecological practice’.