Paul Verlaine The French poet, Symbolist leader, and Decadent Paul-Marie Verlaine was born in Metz, Northeast France on March 30, 1844. His family moved to Paris in 1851 where he was enrolled in the lycée. In 1862 he received his bachelor's degree, then following the wishes of his father, an infantry captain, entered civil service. As a young boy Verlaine had read Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal, inspiring him to write. In Paris, he befriended Parnassian poets such as Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Louis Xavier de Ricard, Catulle Mendès, and François Cippée, and together they frequented ale houses of the Rue Soufflot. Captain Verlaine refused to finance his son's drinking and writing habits. In 1866 Verlaine published his first book of poetry, Poèmes saturniens. As a young boy he had loved Elisa Dehee, an orphan cousin that the Verlaine family had raised, and his second book, Fêtes galantes, was published in 1869 after her death. Though Verlaine married a young woman in 1870 and had son with her, he abandoned that relationship for another affair. La bonne chanson was written to his wife Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville in 1870, yet one year later Verlaine received a letter from a boy, the poet Arthur Rimbaud. The two began a relationship that was seemingly always unsteady. Their passionate affair, the subject of various books, films, and curiosities, ended July 12, 1873 when a drunken Verlaine shot at Rimbaud and injured him in the wrist. He was jailed for eighteen months. His time in prison was invaluable to his writing career: he studied Shakespeare and Cervantes, and wrote his quintessential Romance sans paroles. He renounced his bohemian life and converted to Catholicism. Following his release from prison, Rimbaud convinced Verlaine to commit blasphemy while drunk. Nonetheless, Verlaine's book Sagesse is full of religious sentiment. Verlaine tried teaching, and twice attempted to live in the country with his pupil Lucien Létinois; both times they went bankrupt. Lucien died in 1883, and five years later Verlaine wrote the reflective Amour. The last decade of his life Verlaine suffered from alcoholism and multiple physical maladies. He lived in slums and public hospitals, and spent his days drinking absinthe in Paris cafes. Fortunately, the French people's love of the arts was able to resurrect support and bring in an income for Verlaine: his early poetry was rediscovered, his lifestyle and strange behavior in front of crowds attracted admiration, and in 1894 he was elected France's "Prince of Poets" by his peers. He died in Paris at the age of 52 on January 8, 1896. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/255 Paul Verlaine's (1844-1896) first poem was published in La Revue du progrès moral in 1863. It heralded an ambiguous yet infinitely beautiful body of work that bordered on the threshold of modernity and was to be completely overwhelmed by the precocious Rimbaud. On the hundredth anniversary of his death, tribute is being paid throughout France to someone who, by his own definition, was an accursed poet yet gave new rhythm to the art of poetry. am the Empire at the end of decadence / That watches the great white Barbarians go past...". These strange verses taken from the poem "Langueurs" from the anthology Jadis et Naguère (1884) tell of a life that was evidently terrible, intimate and public in equal measures; they contain the originality and the odyssey of an errant writer, fluctuating continually from debauchery to deepest remorse at the thought of abandoning his wife and home. At the end of the 19th century well-intentioned critics nicknamed Verlaine and a few others from whose midst Arthur Rimbaud was later to emerge, "the accursed poets". In fact, the expression stems from Verlaine himself, elected "Prince of Poets" by his peers in 1894, at the end of a vagrant's life spent in Paris, Rethel, Brussels and London. Tristesse... Up in the Ardennes (northern France), when autumn turns into winter and rivers are reddened by the silt of the earth, when forests cloak their hidden depths, the soul of the accursed can be heard, sighing along country roads, as Paul Verlaine passes by. And yet, he sings the sky above the rooftops, his happy childhood in a shower of nostalgic little poems. Verlaine was born in Metz, eastern France, on March 30, 1844. His father was authoritarian; his mother, sickly, pious and possessive. Throughout her life, she smothered her son, so weak before the bottle, with blind affection. Nonetheless, Verlaine knew happiness. Near Bouillon, in Belgium, the young Paul spent happy summers with his father's family, in landscapes along the banks of the Semois and their patchwork of fields, meadows, dense copses and spongy marshlands. It is a land of lean-flanked wolves, black bilberries and green oak to which, with a tortured soul, he would return later in life. In 1873, Verlaine, recently married and father of a son he later abandoned, infatuated by the brilliance of the adolescent Rimbaud, was wanted by the police for his part in the insurrection of the Paris Commune; naturally he sought exile in the Belgian Ardennes. There, he believed he would rediscover the taste of a paradise lost. First love, first hurt There, in the Ardennes, along little white roads that skirt past forests, we are reminded of the spleen of "Ariettes oubliées", "Paysages belges" and "Aquarelles" published in 1874 in Romances sans paroles, heralding the word-music of La Bonne Chanson (1870). What, then, is the real mystery of Verlaine? How could someone with so much poetic talent, surrounded by so much love be so unfortunate in life? What is the cause of the distress, the nostalgia contained in the quatrain: "Il pleure dans mon coeur / Comme il pleut sur la ville / Quelle est cette langueur / qui pénètre mon coeur?" ("There are tears in my heart / Like the rain on the town / What is this languor that penetrates my heart?). In August 1862, Verlaine completed his school education in Paris, where his parents had moved in 1851. He was then packed off to northern France, to enjoy some rest with his mother's family. What joy, for him, to delve into a melancholy landscape so close to his state of mind! The chrysalis was mutating into an accursed poet. There, among the fields of rape and the reading of Baudelaire, he fell in love with his cousin Elisa Moncomble. It was an impossible love and, come the evening, he would drown his sorrow at the inn. "My God, my God, life is here!" Back in Paris, he sought solace in the delights of the "green angel" of absinthe. He enrolled to study law but found little interest in anything. He took up employment with an insurance company and, later, with the city council. For seven years he languished in boredom. In the cafés, he drowned his existentialist sorrow, wrote poetry and mingled with members of the Parnassian School of Poetry*. In 1866, his anthology Poèmes saturniens, which had been published at author's cost with the help of Elisa, caught the attention of the critics. In poems characterised by lyrical yet singular musicality, Verlaine gave voice to the outpourings and depths of the soul, transposing his feeling into impressions and sensations through nostalgic or sophisticated landscapes. For those, like himself, in quest of the absolute, there remained the Beauty, the Azure and the regret for long-gone loves. But Elisa had never loved him. And Verlaine's melancholy and languorous poetry began to take shape around this first disappointed love. On August 11, 1870, he married Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, barely sixteen years old, in an attempt to settle down to a genuine middle-class lifestyle, aspiring to a "simple and quiet" life. Alas, domesticity was not for him. In September 1871, the young Arthur Rimbaud wrote to him from Charleville. A few days later, the "stealer of fire on feet of wind" arrived in Paris at Verlaine's behest, who became father figure and lover. In February 1872, Mathilde demanded a separation. To calm his outraged wife, Verlaine asked an indignant Rimbaud to leave. But by July, he had made good his escape, for the adolescent had held greater sway, and the two lovers were soon on the road to Brussels. And although Mathilde made an attempt at reconciliation, Rimbaud and Verlaine had already left for London. Back on the Continent, Verlaine was working on Romances sans paroles while the young adolescent published Une saison en enfer a few pages that would radically alter the course of modern literature. The difficult couple then went through a succession of splits and reconciliations. In Brussels, in 1873, Verlaine fired a pistol at Rimbaud. He was arrested, and sent to prison for two years. In 1874, from his cell at Mons, he wrote a number of mystic poems, imbued with sincere repentance, later published in Sagesse (1881) and Jadis et Naguère (1884), as well as erotic poems in Parallèlement (1889). On leaving prison in 1875, Verlaine sailed to England, where he taught for two years. He returned there in 1879, living with his new lover, Lucien Létinois, a former pupil at the school at which Verlaine had taught for two years at Rethel, in the Ardennes. They had been expelled due to their "particular friendship". Why is it that, in Romances sans paroles (1874) or La Bonne Chanson (1870), inspired by Mathilde, no one had heard his cry for help not to surrender to his demons? Once again, the generous Ardennes provided a refuge. In 1880, at Coulommes near Rethel, the poet bought a farmstead for Létinois. Together, they decided to give rural life a try and, once again, there was failure, separation and alcohol. The following year, Verlaine returned to Paris to live with his mother, rue de la Roquette... Gone were the days of young lovers. After a life as a pariah, punctuated by spells in hospitals, prisons, furnished lodgings and sordid dramas, Verlaine died in Paris, on January 8, 1896, at the age of fifty-two. Pen in hand, he nonetheless found brilliance in old age. Suddenly, while "devoured by rheumatism, cirrhosis, gastritis and jaundice", a modicum of glory finally awaited him. In 1895, the young generation of poets saw him as the master of modern lyrical art. He was acclaimed and sought after in Belgium, England and Holland. But it was too late. "Qu'as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà / Pleurant sans cesse / Dis qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilà / De ta jeunesse?" ("What have you done, O you there / Crying relentlessly / Tell me, what have you done, O you there / With your youth?") (Sagesse). Yves-Marie Lucot * They include poets such as Mallarmé and Théophile Gautier who, as a reaction to Romanticism, pursue an ideal of formal perfection and defend a notion of "art for art's sake". "Music above all else" Verlaine transformed poetry, even though, through idleness, he may at times have ruined his own. He introduced greater flexibility to the rules of versification, using the device of irregular verse in particular, "more soluble in air", and created a modern form of poetry characterised by lyrical depth and a taste for confidence. Written in 1874, the poem "Art poétique" was considered as a symbolist manifesto when it was published ten years later in the anthology Jadis et Naguère. This famous piece remarkably defines Paul Verlaine's conception of poetry. Its first line is a profession of faith: "De la musique avant toute chose..." "Music above all else..." As the genius of dream and the half-tones of the soul, Verlaine invented a flowing and musical poetry thanks to the subtle use of rhythm. For example: there are two ways of "interpreting" the rhythm in the first verse of the sonnet "My familiar dream": "I often have this strange and penetrating dream". If it is an Alexandrine line (a twelve-foot verse) with the caesura on the sixth foot (between rêve and étrange), the play of accents highlights two different sonorities (rêve and "trant"). If, however, it is a Romantic triple verse (with a caesura every four feet), an assonance is created, a sequence of identical sounds ("-vent", "-trange", "-trant"), a captivating rhythmic ambiguity... one that inspired composers such as Fauré, Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky. Ministry of Foreign Affairs © Ministry of Foreign Affairs / Label France, magazine http://web.archive.org/web/20040625162435/http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/LETTRES/VERLAIN/verlai.html