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
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
