Histoires de cul et du maître 'invaincu': pornographie, parodie ... et Victor Hugo dans les vers érotiques de Verlaine

In «Balanide II», from Hombres, the volume of homo-erotic verse published after Verlaine's death, the poet describes his pleasure in being penetrated by his "master". Since the stanzaic form of this poem is identical to « Sara la baigneuse » by Victor Hugo, I read the intertextual echoes and metapoetic implications of the text using the conceptual and methodological frameworks of queer studies. What emerges is a conception of poetic creation which foregrounds play and pleasure, and which forces us to think beyond the binary logic of such relationships as penetrator/penetrated, original/copy.