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…
“To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which lies in the delight of guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing
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 poésie est le langage naturel de tous les cultes, et la forme même de la prière.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
