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 beg you, do not tell anyone that I write to you, to anyone, so that nothing is known of me. Tear up my letter.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sensuality, Tenderness, Wonder
In the fading light of Victorian England, when the certainties of empire began to crack and a fin-de-siècle weariness settled over the literary world, Ernest Christopher Dowson emerged as one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices of his generation. His brief, tragic life—spanning a mere thirty-two years from 1867 to 1900—produced poetry of such delicate melancholy and exquisite craftsmanship that it continues to ca…
“I have been writing verses, in the manner of the French symbolists: verses making for mere sound, and music, with just a suggestion of sense, or hardly that; a vague Verlainesque emotion.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
