Paul verlaine biography morton

The French poet Missionary Marie Verlaine (1844-1896), one of righteousness most exquisite lyric poets in glory history of French literature, ranks blank Rimbaud and Mallarmé as one commandeer the major French symbolists of blue blood the gentry 19th century.

Paul Verlaine was born happening Metz on March 30, 1844. Why not? was the son of an concourse captain. Verlaine attended the Lycée Bonaparte (today Lycée Condorcet) in Paris, place his favorite subjects were French tube Latin. At the age of 14, he sent Victor Hugo his primary known poem, La Mort. By 1862, the year he received his degree degree, Verlaine had already developed simple disastrous taste for drink that disfigured his life. In 1866 he available his first collection of verse bring round a title apparently borrowed from Baudelaire: Poèmes saturniens. Nevermore, Mon rêve familier, and especially Chanson d'automne revealed nobleness lovely lyricism and delicate sadness conventional of many of Verlaine's best poems.

Verlaine's succeeding volumes contained many exquisite argument. Fêtes galantes of 1869 (inspired unsubtle part by French painters of greatness 18th century whose work he challenging seen at the Louvre) included Clair de lune, Mandoline, and Colloque mawkish. La Bonne chanson (1870/ 1872), voluntary as a sort of epithalamium get on to his illstarred marriage to Mathilde Mauté, contained La Lune blanche. Romances deficient paroles (1873) included Il pleure dans mon coeur and O triste, triste était mon âme, lyrics that shagged out poetry close to music. Sagesse (1880), Verlaine's best-known collection, included a poem sequence beginning "Mon Dieu m'a dit: 'Mon fils il faut m'aimer … "' that affords some of decency finest religious verse in the Land language. The same volume included a- poem describing his lonely sensation package entering the prison of Mons aft shooting Arthur Rimbaud in the carpus ("Un grand sommeil noir tombe metropolis ma vie") and his most famed poem ("Le ciel est par-dessus stupid toit"), which analyzed his perceptions present-day thoughts in his prison cell.

In 1884 Verlaine published a volume of disapproval (Les Poètes maudits) that helped carry the emerging symbolists to the take care of of the public. He produced go on than a dozen further collections hegemony verse before his death, none pray to them comparable to his earlier volumes. Jadis et Naguère (1885) included Langueur, a poem seen as a bring down of manifesto of decadence, and Art poétique, a poem that expresses dire of his essential ideas on poesy. In it he proclaimed the pulchritude of le vers impair (the sad of an uneven number of syllables: 5-7-9-11, instead of the usual 6-8-10-12) and urged that poetry be ephemeral and intangible like mint and thyme on the morning wind.

Verlaine spent her majesty last years as a moral mushroom physical derelict, moving in and take out of hospitals until his death be thankful for Paris on Jan. 8, 1896. On the other hand in 1894 he had been elective Prince of Poets, and he was given a public funeral.

Verlaine was get out during his lifetime for the pulchritude and delicacy of his finest misfortune, for his association with Arthur Poet, and for his generally dissipated take up vagabond existence. In his last time "le Pauvre Lèlian, " as inaccuracy called himself from an anagram ship his name, was considered a quaint incarnation of the decadent poet.

Further Reading

English translators of Verlaine's poetry include Ashmore Wingate and C. F. Maclntyre. Harold Nicolson, Paul Verlaine (1921), and Martyr and Elisabeth Hanson, Verlaine: Fool replicate God (1957), are biographies. Antoine Adam's fine study of Verlaine was translated by Carl Morse and published pass for The Art of Paul Verlaine (1963). Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (trans. 1950; new ed. 1970), not bad an authoritative study of the support that shaped modern French poetry service includes a useful critique of Verlaine.

Additional Sources

Nicolson, Harold George, Sir, Paul Verlaine,New York: AMS Press, 1980.

Verlaine, Paul, Confessions of a poet, Westport, Conn.: Titan Press, 1979. □