The Voicing of Numinous Experience in the Founders of Symbolic Lyricism

Abstract

The focus of this article is on the relation between religion and literature in 19^th century French symbolist poetry. Contrary to the main approaches taken hitherto, which treat the above-mentioned relation in terms of content, following the appearance of the originally religious motifs, themes and ideas in the texts, this article offers an alternative by dealing with the relation between religion and literature primarily from a formal aspect. The starting point is not a strict division between content and form, but the specific interaction between the two. The basic thesis of this article is that it was the specific language of poetry, as developed by the symbolist poets, which enabled this poetry to become a privileged means of expressing modern religious (or numinous, to be more precise) experience. A detailed analysis of poems by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, which are widely accepted as having outlined the basic shape of literary symbolism, is made. Through an analysis and comparison of their literary texts, essays and correspondence, the principal features of symbolist writing are extracted from the aspect of their ability to express a numinous experience or object. These include first of all a (symbolist) use of a symbol and the approach of poetry to music. The article also deals with so-called “sensual unreality” (typical of Rimbaud’s poetry) and “pure poetry” (typical of Mallarmé’s poetry). With the help of the last two features it can be shown how and why the symbolist poetry, which at first made an attempt to put into words numinous objects, was transformed into a radical reflection on the nature of human realization and utterance, which is why it remains of interest in linguistic and cognitive theory or epistemology.