Although Impressionism and Symbolism are but two of the numerous ‘-isms’ found in Paris in Debussy’s early years, these two movements are invariably associated with him. This chapter defines the symbolist literary style in France and surveys its development through some of its leading figures as well as its diffusion through some of its main institutions (Mallarmé’s salon, cafés, journals, bookstores). The author distinguishes between two phases in Debussy’s creative output: 1882–1902, when French-speaking literary symbolism clearly dominated the composer’s inspiration, and 1902–1917, when he became receptive to a wider range of poetry (especially that of French poets from the 15th to the 17th centuries). Important Debussy landmark pieces inspired by Symbolist writers (mélodies, the orchestral piece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande) are situated within the context of other musical works equally inspired by the same writers (Fauré, Bonheur, Bréville, Chabrier, Charpentier, Chausson, Duparc, Ravel).

When Martin Heidegger famously rose in 1946 to pay tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke on the twentieth anniversary of the poet’s death, it was hardly by accident that he framed his interpretation of Rilke’s work by quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s now canonical question (‘Wherefore poets…’) regarding the task of poetry in the time called the present, lines that also enabled Heidegger to voice his own distress at the state in which postwar Germany found itself and, more obliquely, the extent of his own involvement in the events of the previous decade and a half. During these postwar years, there were arguably few more attentive or perceptive readers of Heidegger’s writings on poetry than the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot, whose own opposition to National Socialism was from the outset forceful and unyielding. This chapter examines Blanchot’s borrowings from Heidegger (as deployed in Blanchot’s account of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé), his rigorous and probing criticisms of Heidegger’s thinking, and contrasts with that of Heidegger Blanchot’s own significantly divergent interpretation of the work of Hölderlin and Rilke.

Chapter 4 takes personification as its point of departure in the wake of Wordsworth’s well-known dismissal of it. From this perspective, Coleridge’s early conversation poems – where a tenuous reciprocity with the natural world is with difficulty achieved through the unfolding artifice of the poem – and Clare’s recreations in verse of remembered conversations with self-personifying natural things are inventive extensions of eighteenth-century methods for putting human beings into social converse with the natural world. Both, the chapter argues, are instances of what Jonathan Culler calls “projects of animation”: poems where more subtle practices of personification support a poetry that reaches out to a chattering world of non-human beings and things to make them talk not only to each other but also, at least in poetry, to us. Such tactics seemed altogether more possible, however, early in the century than toward its close – as the poetry of Swinburne’s French correspondents, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, makes clear.

Davinia Caddy examines the role of music and music-listening in the stage shows and reception histories of dancer Loie Fuller. A midwestern American, Fuller found fame across Western Europe and the United States with her dance-and-light effects, theatrical performances that seemed to transform her body into a flower, fire, waves or the sun: to her symbolist observers, into pure metaphor or idea. Music was often incorporated into this abstract mélange, thought to symbolize a sphere of influence or aesthetic condition that text and visuals (dance, set design, props) could only aspire to. With reference to little-known source material, the author offers a revisionist reading of Fuller’s musical initiative and her spectators’ attention to it. Drawing analogies with early modernist visual art and advertising, the chapter suggests new and different ways of envisaging music, and music-listening, in relation to Fuller’s dance shows and the copy-cat craze they inspired.