Poetics and Poetry: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Poe, and Mallarmé's 'Eternal Logic'

2007 Winter; 35(2): 393-407. Abstract This article explores the extent to which the radical transformation of music envisaged by Wagner in the second half of the nineteenth century announced what Nietzsche later described as the fundamental crisis of modernity. It also examines how Mallarmé responded to the musician who wanted to impose limits to the poetic art, and how the French poet's views on the subject had in fact been influenced by Poe and Baudelaire. Through the new path he foresaw beyond the crisis of literature and poetry, Mallarmé conceived of a "logic" that, he suggested, was "eternal," to counter the musician's claims and, along with them, challenge and oppose from a poetic perspective, the philosophical ideals of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. (ETM)