SOURCE: Porter, Laurence M. “The Crisis of French Symbolism.” In The Crisis of French Symbolism, pp. 1-26. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Porter outlines the progress of nineteenth-century French poetry from Neoclassicism to Romanticism and Symbolism.

The history of the nineteenth-century French lyric needs to be redefined. The very discredit into which diachronic approaches have fallen during the eras of Structuralism and Poststructuralism allows the assumptions that have informed these approaches to survive unchallenged in the collective preconscious of literary critics. We may consider literary history no longer worthy of consideration; we may divert our attention from it; but it will still survive subliminally, intact, and insulated from the salutary influence of competing ideas. Since we each have a personal history and pass through an organic life cycle, we shall always be compelled on some level to project the historical and organic metaphors...