SOURCE: “Visual and Spatial Imagery in Verlaine's Fêtes galantes,” in PMLA, Vol. 87, No. 5, October, 1972, pp. 1007–015.

In the following essay, Walker argues that the visual and spatial imagery in Fêtes galantes make that volume distinctive from Verlaine's other works of poetry.

Despite their display of certain characteristics, such as delicate suggestion and musicality, inherent in all his poetry, the poems in Paul Verlaine's Fêtes galantes stand apart from the main body of his works in two ways. First, they employ visual and spatial effects to an extent unusual in the rest of his poems, and second, as a total composition of twenty-two poems they possess a thematic unity based largely upon the relationships between recurrent ideas and spatial effects. Before elucidating these aspects of Fêtes galantes, I wish to review briefly the general impressions produced by these poems and some typical critical efforts to deal...