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 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…
“£10 is a chimerical sum to me; but let us prepare our garland for the day, surely it must come, when this impecunious tyranny is overworn.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
