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’.