The poetics of Georges Bataille are relatively little known in the critical literature on Bataille, in part due to the fact that the relevant texts are somewhat dispersed across his complete works, and partly because Bataille is most often still not thought of as a poet or as a writer who considers poetry seriously or to the same extent as philosophy or fiction. It is also the case that Bataille himself was profoundly ambivalent about poetry and saw poetry as a minor, lesser discourse, one towards which he declared a hatred. I seek to understand this ambivalence and do so by analysing the presence of Rimbaud in his work, a figure with whom Bataille engages critically, often obliquely, but profoundly and throughout the period during which he writes on poetry. This problematic engagement, from the starting point of rejecting poetic history, nonetheless determines the formal, thematic and philosophical problems of Bataille’s own poetic project. The approach to Bataille’s writings via those of Rimbaud - while also taking account of broader references to literary history and to poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarme - allows for Bataille’s poetry to be considered afresh in a literary context rather than a broadly philosophical one. The methodology I employ works through a series of close readings of Bataille’s texts - principally L ’Experience interieure, L ’Impossible and L ’Erotisme as well as La Litterature et le mal and key articles - to analyse the core concerns of Bataille’s poetics and how these concerns are articulated in poems written by Bataille himself. I argue that Bataille’s poetics engage with and concretise his other concerns, the notion of sacrifice being crucial among them, and also his philosophical enquiries into experience and subjectivity. I argue that the notion of sacrifice dominates the poetics and is the guiding praxis for many of the poems, yet both sacrifice and subjectivity are problematic. Sacrifice and subjectivity both present difficulties as well as offering solutions to the conditions of representation in poetry after Mallarme, Apollinaire, Surrealism and Rimbaud.

Translation is generally understood as the transformation of text from one language into another. But translation is also a dialogue between two languages, between two versions of a text, and between author and translator. Such dialogue involves thought on language, its usage and potential, and on literary creation itself. Poetry also involves attention to, and experimentation with, language and contains a constant analysis of its own expression. This dissertation examines this coincidence of translation and poetry and seeks to explore how translation, both in theory and in practice, illuminates the understanding of a key development in modern French poetry: the prose poem. It analyses the relationship between the practice of translation and thought on translation, and the development of the new poetic form which is prose poetry. It concentrates on the aesthetics of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and shows that in each case an intensely self-reflexive poetics is driven by an engagement with translation. Divided into two parts, the dissertation first considers each poet’s differing relation to translation. It shows that translation enabled Baudelaire to develop his own style, that it shaped Mallarmé’s relationship with common language, and that it sits at the heart of Rimbaud’s poetic ethics. The second part concentrates on the specific issues of the prose poem in relation to translation, and demonstrates that the form distils fundamental issues in translation and is in turn shaped by them. The prose poem oscillates between two literary forms, and is itself a form in translation, engaging with its different versions. Baudelaire’s, Mallarmé’s and Rimbaud’s poetic experiments in prose echo and reflect each other. The prose poem and its generation in translation provide a critical space where the three-way dialogue between these defining figures of modernism may be heard and examined.

This thesis examines the role of dialogic processes in representations of conversion narratives and expressions of poetic subjectivity across the works of four poets: Guittone d’Arezzo (c.1235-1294), Guido Guinizzelli (c.1230-1276), Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255-1300) and Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). The introduction proposes a definition of ‘dialogic processes’ drawing on theoretical models of performativity and dialogism. It presents the usefulness of these approaches to the analysis of narratives of conversion and accounts of subjectivity in poetry. Chapter 1 analyses Guittone’s conversion poetics in light of these processes and seeks to complicate the teleology of his narrative of self. Chapter 2 examines the poetry of Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti, first establishing the ‘poetic conversion’ of Guinizzelli in dialogue with his own and others’ poetry. It then examines Cavalcanti’s physiological performance of a polyphonic subjectivity and how far this poetic expression partakes in the dialogic processes previously discussed in relation to religiously inflected writing. Chapters 3 and 4 will explore the manifestations of these phenomena of dialogue and performance in Dante’s oeuvre with particular focus on the Commedia as a key site for intertextual interaction both with his own earlier texts and with the texts (and figures) of the other poets under discussion. These chapters will seek to reopen the teleological closure which Dante tries to impose on his vernacular predecessors, as well as on his own works. The weight of critical engagement with Dante’s predecessors has treated them as sources or reference points for Dante’s own praxis. I aim to consider Guittone, Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti on their own terms and in dialogue with one another before approaching Dante through these poets, thus reconstructing the networks of poetic dialogue in late medieval Italy, and situating Dante firmly within a dialogic tradition of narratives of self and conversion.