Paul-Jean Toulet was born on 5 June 1867 in Pau, in the Béarn region of southwestern France, and died on 6 September 1920 at Guéthary, on the Basque coast. He occupies a singular place in French literature: neither wholly Symbolist nor conventionally modernist, neither simply a Decadent aesthete nor merely a regional poet of nostalgia. He was a writer of poems, novels, criticism, aphorisms, and journalism, but his la…
“Le bonheur est une petite chose que l'on grignote, assis par terre, au soleil.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Peace
Alphonse de Lamartine was born on 21 October 1790 in Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and died in Paris on 1 March 1869. Poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, parliamentarian, and revolutionary statesman, he lived at the point where literary Romanticism and modern French political life came into being. Few writers have more completely embodied the nineteenth-century belief that eloquence might be a pub…
“La France est une nation qui s'ennuie.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
