This work is a guide to the reading of Dante's great poem, intended for the use of students and laymen, particularly those who are approaching the Inferno for the first time. While carefully pointing out the uniqueness, tone, and color of each of Dante's thirty-four cantos, Fowlie never loses sight of the continuity of the poet's discourse. Each canto is related thematically to others, and the rich web of symbols is displayed and disentangled as the poem's unity, patterns, and structures are revealed. What particularly distinguishes Wallace Fowlie's reading of the Inferno is his emphasis on both the timelessness and the timeliness of Dante's masterpiece. By underlining the archetypal elements in the poem and drawing parallels to contemporary literature, Fowlie has brought Dante and his characters much closer to modern readers.

Ten unusual stories by French literary masters from Voltaire to Camus: "Micromégas," by Voltaire; "The Atheist's Mass" by Balzac; "The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaler" by Flaubert; "Spleen of Paris" by Baudelaire; "Minuet" by de Maupassant; "The Guest" by Camus, and four more. Accurate English translations appear on pages facing the original French. Also included are a French-English vocabulary list, oral and writing exercises. Critical introductions.

This is a new release of the original 1943 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1947 edition.

Four Essays On Peguy, Rouault, Maritain And Myths Of Modern Poetry.

Four Essays On Peguy, Rouault, Maritain And Myths Of Modern Poetry.

Includes References To Proust, Gide, Mauriac, Leon Bloy, Claudel And More.

Includes References To Proust, Gide, Mauriac, Leon Bloy, Claudel And More.

Four Essays On Peguy, Rouault, Maritain And Myths Of Modern Poetry.

Four Essays On Peguy, Rouault, Maritain And Myths Of Modern Poetry.

Includes References To Proust, Gide, Mauriac, Leon Bloy, Claudel And More.

"The poet makes himself into a visionary by a long derangement of all the senses."--Rimbaud

In 1968 Jim Morrison, founder and lead singer of the rock band the Doors, wrote to Wallace Fowlie, a scholar of French literature and a professor at Duke University. Morrison thanked Fowlie for producing an English translation of the complete poems of Rimbaud. He needed the translation, he said, because, "I don't read French that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me." Fourteen years later, when Fowlie first heard the music of the Doors, he recognized the influence of Rimbaud in Morrison's lyrics.
In "Rimbaud and Jim Morrison" Fowlie, a master of the form of the memoir, reconstructs the lives of the two youthful poets from a personal perspective. In their twinned stories he discovers an uncanny symmetry, a pattern far richer than the simple truth that both led lives full of adventure and both made poetry of their thirst for the liberation of the self. The result is an engaging account of the connections between an exceptional French symbolist who gave up writing poetry at the age of twenty, died young, and whose poems are still avidly read to this day, and an American rock musician whose brief career ignited an entire generation and has continued to fascinate millions around the world in the twenty years since his death in Paris. In this dual portrait, Fowlie gives us a glimpse of the affinities and resemblances between European literary traditions and American rock music and youth culture in the late twentieth century.
A personal meditation on two unusual, yet emblematic, cultural figures, this book also stands as a summary of a noted scholar's lifelong reflections on creative artists.

Wallace Fowlie provides an uncommonly well-written survey of French Symbolism by way of analyzing key poems in relation to the historical and literary contexts in which they were written.

The literary symbol, as it has been used since Baudelaire's time, has in Fowlie's view a closer relationship with the religious spirit of humanity than with any practical or didactic use. Symbolism has been a major focus of literary study since Baudelaire's Correspondances, which can be seen as a succinct manifesto. It has provided an aesthetic basis for works that have elements of both myth and allegory. These are among the most impressive works of literature since 1850, which have reacted strongly against a realistic art of precision in order to reflect preoccupations that are religious and philosophical.

After tracing the background of Symbolism from Romanticism to "Art for Art's Sake," Fowlie considers the work of Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Corbiere, and Verlaine. He then recapitulates the major features of Symbolism and illustrates its continuity to our day. Fowlie sees Symbolism and modern poetry not as the art of rules and obstacles, but rather as the art of triumph over obstacles and the transcendence of human adventure and experience. He concludes with penetrating analyses of the poetic practice of Valery, Claudel, St. John Perse, and Rene Char.

The "enfant terrible" of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry; his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose.
The first translation of the poet's complete works when it was published in 1966, "Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters" introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius--among them the Doors's lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who "don't read French that easily." Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud's complete poetic works.
Thoroughly revising Fowlie's edition, Seth Whidden has made changes on virtually every page, correcting errors, reordering poems, adding previously omitted versions of poems and some letters, and updating the text to reflect current scholarship; left in place are Fowlie's literal and respectful translations of Rimbaud's complex and nontraditional verse. Whidden also provides a foreword that considers the heritage of Fowlie's edition and adds a bibliography that acknowledges relevant books that have appeared since the original publication. On its fortieth anniversary, "Rimbaud" remains the most authoritative--and now, completely up-to-date--edition ofthe young master's entire poetic ouvre.