Waking the Face That No One Is: A Study in the Musical Context of Symbolist Poetics

Poetry and music have seldom been more closely associated than at the end of the nineteenth century, and the texts in which Baudelaire and Wagner, Mallarmé and Scriabin, Maeterlinck and Debussy evoked the reader’s and the listener’s states of mind are unusually rich in suggestion. Can poetry combine, as music seems to do, the transcendent satisfaction of an all-inclusive viewpoint with the excitement and uncertainty of an unfolding narrative? Can it partake of music’s power in order to give...