L’Altérité de la nature chez Verlaine dans les ‘Ariettes oubliées’ II, IV, V, et VII

Abstract

Verlaine’s poetry from 1874 demonstrates a peculiar relationship between the narrator and his environment that emerges in the ‘Ariettes oubliées’ section of Romances sans paroles. Marked by the loss of an affinity between nature and humanity, Ariettes II, IV, V, and VII offer fruitful ground for ecocritical analysis of the alterity of nature and of nature’s role in the formation of poetic values. This article considers the relationship between key ecological concepts and prosody in order to offer an ecopoetic perspective on the tensions between humanity and nature towards the end of the nineteenth century.