Combining close reading with broad theoretical questions, Patrick McGuinness's latest book is a thorough, lively, and multidimensional study of the relation, or rather relations, between poetry and radical politics ... scholars interested in fin-de-siècle poetry and politics and non-specialists interested in a context-based theoretical articulation of the relations between poetry and politics will find much to provoke further question and analysis.

Cory Browning, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Perhaps the greatest of the many strengths of this book is its author's clear exposition of the complicated nature of the poetic, cultural, and political scene of the fin de siècle. The style is lively, witty, and engaging - the novelist's hand is in evidence - but also accessible to those who are not specialists of poetry. Professor McGuinness's book thus makes an important contribution to the field and should be of great interest not only to literary specialists of French poetry and modernism, but also to historians who explore the intersection of culture and politics at the fin de siècle.

Modernist Cultures

He [McGuinness] shows us how poets at the time grappled with these issues. Most failed to grasp them, Mallarmé being a major exception. One of the revelations of the book is Pierre Quillard, who appears in this account to be the most lucid contemporary analyst of relations between Symbolism and politics. McGuinness emerges as a very worthy successor to Mallarmé and Quillard in his unfolding of such relations. Like them, through analyses that somehow seem to go to the heart of what poetry is, he shows us how and why poetry and politics draw on each other, but resist being mapped on to each other.

Forum of Modern Language Studies