The largest impediment to appreciating Hart Crane as a symbolist modern American poet derives from the fragmentary critical attention paid to his borrowings from and familiarity with French Symbolists like Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Almost equally important, the early career of T. S. Eliot exerted a profound impact on Crane's poetic development and indeed served as the primary introduction to many nineteenth-century French poets for Crane and many other American poets of his generation. This dissertation initially examines contemporary critical definitions of the symbolist method and explores the extent to which Hart Crane's familiarity with the French language helped shape his exposure to writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. A reading of Crane's "Black Tambourine," a self-professed "Baudelairesque thing," indicates the dissertation's general approach by showing how Crane's poems evolve as "mingling incantations," as artistic blendings interfused by the aesthetics of the major French Symbolist poets. After presenting a historical overview and critique of the critical reception given to Crane as a symbolist, the rest of the dissertation interrogates the relationship of Crane to Eliot and their views on literary influence; examines the connections between Crane, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud; and finally explores the theoretical affinities between Mallarmé and Crane's formulation of a neo-symbolist poetics.

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S’inscrivant dans le tournant éthique survenu il y a peu en théorie littéraire, cette étude analyse la relation entre éthique et poésie moderne, avançant que les implications éthiques de ces textes ne sont pas seulement enrichies par, mais aussiindissociables de l’emploi créatif et non-conventionnel de la langue rencontré dans ce courant. La majorité des articles consacrés à la critique éthique se concentrent sur la transmission explicite de valeurs morales par le biais de romansou de nouvelles – sans tenir compte de la complexité linguistique renfermée par l’énoncé lyrique – ou assimilent l’éthique de la littérature, de façon très généralisée, à des phénomènes purement esthétiques à l’instar de l’expérience textuelleémanant de l’altérité ou de l’indécidabilité – et contournent de ce fait les préoccupations éthiques concrètes de chacun des textes. Dans le but d’atteindre une compréhension plus nuancée de la relation entre éthique et poésie (moderne), je propose d’envisager la parole lyrique comme un lieu de révélation du monde ouvrant de nouvelles perspectives sur les questions éthiques qui restent voilées ou dissimulées dans le discours ordinaire. Cette idée a été développée par MartinHeidegger et Paul Ricoeur, qui, dans leurs écrits sur l’art et la littérature, se penchent sur la manière dont les textes poétiques rompent avec les contraintes du discours institutionnel et rendent au langage son pouvoir expressif originel. [etc.] / Situated in the context of the recent ethical turn in literary theory, this study examines the relationship between ethics and modernist poetry, arguing that the ethical implications of these texts are not only enriched by, but also inseparable from, the creative, unconventional use of language typical of this genre. The majority of studies in the field of ethical criticism either focus on the explicit transmission of moral values in novels and short stories, while ignoring the linguistic complexity at the heart of lyric utterance, or equate the ethics of literature, in a very generalized way, with purely aesthetic phenomena such asthe textual experience of alterity or undecidability, thereby bypassing the concrete ethical concerns of individual texts. In order to attain a more nuanced comprehension of the relationship between ethics and (modernist) poetry, I propose to view lyric language as a site of world-disclosure opening up new perspectives on ethical issues that remain veiled or hidden in ordinary speech. This idea has been elaborated by Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, whose writings on art and literature engage with the ways in which poetic texts break the constraints of institutionalized discourse and return language to its original, expressive power. [etc.]