The Verlaine-Environment

This chapter begins with an analysis of the pictorial aspect of Verlaine’s ‘haiku-poetry’. Drawing on Barthes, who ties haiku to photography, and on Simondon’s notion of the ‘cycle of images’, the chapter argues that in Verlaine’s poetry images are associated with a form of ‘tuning’: when we contemplate and/or produce images, we establish an equilibrium between ourselves and the environment. The proposed reading of Verlaine is then placed in relation to readings by Jean-Pierre Richard, Arnaud Bernadet and Clive Scott. Already in 1988, Scottt argued that Verlaine’s poetry ‘casts anthropocentricity in doubt’. Probing Scott’s statement, the chapter suggests that Verlaine’s poetry orients us towards what is today theorised as affectivity and ‘nonconscious cognition’ (N. Katherine Hayles). This paves the way for an explicit answer to the key question: how does Verlaine speak to the present? Verlaine’s best-known poetry relies upon – and produces – an understanding of human subjectivity as being intimately caught up in an environment (rural, urban, or linguistic) which always exceeds it; this conception of subjectivity is in tune with our Anthropocene times.