Paul Verlaine was born Paul-Marie Verlaine on 30 March 1844 in Metz, then a French garrison city in Lorraine, and died in Paris on 8 January 1896. Few poets have made a more decisive contribution to the sound, atmosphere, and inward freedom of modern French verse, and few have lived so visibly within the contradictions that their work explores. Verlaine could write with extraordinary delicacy about rain, moonlight, p…
“I am quite discouraged, quite sad at times. Would you believe that one of my sorrows is still my wife!”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sensuality, Tenderness, Wonder
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…
“Il faut, avec les mots de tout le monde, écrire comme personne.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Peace
