Stories about sex and the “undefeated master” Pornography, parody –and Victor Hugo– in the erotic poetry of Verlaine

In “Balanide II”, from the homoerotic poetry collection Hombres, published after Verlaine’s death, the poetic subject enjoys being penetrated by their “master”. With the strophic form being that of Hugo’s “Sara la baigneuse”, we look at the work’s intertextual echoes and metapoetic elements through the prism of queer studies. This leads to the development of a conception of poetic creation that the primacy of play and pleasure forces us to reconsider in terms beyond the binaries of penetrator/penetrated, original/copy.