Abstract: A univocal representation of poetic modernity understood as a demiurgic notion of creative power has led to ignorance of the part that Carco, as a leading figure in the movement known as Fantaisisme, took in the exploration of marginalized forms of modern aesthetics and the way in which his poetry probed the ontological tensions which undergird it. His melancholy and his tracking of false appearances owe less to sentimentalism than to the inheritance of a certain romantic irony and to his intuition of a true ontology of the lack impacting the designative deficiencies of language as much as an existential reality whose double is nonexistence.
