In the hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…
“Poetry is the expression, through human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning in the aspects of existence; it gives authenticity to our sojourn and constitutes the sole spiritual task.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, and died on 10 November 1891 in Marseille. Few writers have produced so small a body of work and so immense a legend. Rimbaud wrote nearly all the poetry for which he is remembered between his mid-teens and about twenty, then turned away from literature with an apparent decisiveness that has fascinat…
“I have always had a strong neuralgia where my leg was amputated, that is, in the part that remains.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
