Book excerpt: Challenging traditional histories of the nineteenth-century French lyric, Laurence Porter maintains that from 1851 to 1875 Symbolism constituted neither a movement nor a system, but rather represented a crisis of confidence in the powers of poetry as a communicative act. The Crisis of French Symbolism offers a provocative reinterpretation of the four acknowledged masters of Symbolist poetry: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.