Le fleuve de Babel rêve d’Ophélie et de Narcisse Une lecture de Babylone de René Crevel

In an article of 2006 dedicated to “Babel in nineteenth-century poetry”, Peter Schnyder emphasised the extent to which the disaster of Babel has been rewritten by a large portion of modern literature as a “positive event, a moment which founded a new freedom”. By preferring diversity to uniformity, opening up to critical comprehension, formal experimentation, and the ‘crisis in verse’ and prose, nineteenth-century poetry reproduced and renewed Babel.