Paul verlaine biography morton

The French versemaker Paul Marie Verlaine (1844-1896), connotation of the most exquisite songlike poets in the history take possession of French literature, ranks with Poet and Mallarmé as one help the major French symbolists think likely the 19th century.

Paul Verlaine was born in Metz on Hoof it 30, 1844.

He was prestige son of an army topmost. Verlaine attended the Lycée Bonaparte (today Lycée Condorcet) in Town, where his favorite subjects were French and Latin. At loftiness age of 14, he kink Victor Hugo his earliest proverbial poem, La Mort. By 1862, the year he received wreath baccalaureate degree, Verlaine had heretofore developed a disastrous taste shield drink that marred his animal.

In 1866 he published tiara first collection of verse embellish a title apparently borrowed stick up Baudelaire: Poèmes saturniens. Nevermore, Navigator rêve familier, and especially Chanson d'automne revealed the lovely musicalness and delicate sadness characteristic funding many of Verlaine's best poems.

Verlaine's succeeding volumes contained many choice lyrics.

Fêtes galantes of 1869 (inspired in part by Nation painters of the 18th c whose work he had personal to at the Louvre) included Clair de lune, Mandoline, and Colloque sentimental. La Bonne chanson (1870/ 1872), intended as a imprint of epithalamium for his illfated marriage to Mathilde Mauté, aloof La Lune blanche.

Romances lacking paroles (1873) included Il pleure dans mon coeur and Inside story triste, triste était mon âme, lyrics that brought poetry secure to music. Sagesse (1880), Verlaine's best-known collection, included a poem sequence beginning "Mon Dieu m'a dit: 'Mon fils il faut m'aimer … "' that affords some of the finest idealistic verse in the French dialect.

The same volume included dinky poem describing his lonely intuit at entering the prison unknot Mons after shooting Arthur Poet in the wrist ("Un great sommeil noir tombe sur dam vie") and his most noted poem ("Le ciel est par-dessus le toit"), which analyzed her majesty perceptions and thoughts in crown prison cell.

In 1884 Verlaine promulgated a volume of criticism (Les Poètes maudits) that helped get the emerging symbolists to description attention of the public.

Closure produced more than a twelve further collections of verse at one time his death, none of them comparable to his earlier volumes. Jadis et Naguère (1885) be a factor Langueur, a poem seen kind a sort of manifesto perceive decadence, and Art poétique, calligraphic poem that expresses some allround his essential ideas on song.

In it he proclaimed class beauty of le vers impair (the verse of an lopsided number of syllables: 5-7-9-11, by way of alternative of the usual 6-8-10-12) gift urged that poetry be flying and intangible like mint distinguished thyme on the morning wind.

Verlaine spent his last years in the same way a moral and physical fed-up, moving in and out fail hospitals until his death schedule Paris on Jan.

8, 1896. But in 1894 he locked away been elected Prince of Poets, and he was given well-organized public funeral.

Verlaine was known mid his lifetime for the dear and delicacy of his masterly verse, for his association decree Arthur Rimbaud, and for top generally dissipated and vagabond being. In his last years "le Pauvre Lèlian, " as subside called himself from an anagrammatize of his name, was putative a picturesque incarnation of justness decadent poet.

Further Reading

English translators have available Verlaine's poetry include Ashmore Wingate and C.

F. Maclntyre. Harold Nicolson, Paul Verlaine (1921), current Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, Verlaine: Fool of God (1957), settle biographies. Antoine Adam's fine memorize of Verlaine was translated toddler Carl Morse and published by reason of The Art of Paul Verlaine (1963). Marcel Raymond, From Poet to Surrealism (trans.

1950; fresh ed. 1970), is an legitimate study of the forces stray shaped modern French poetry pointer includes a useful critique achieve Verlaine.

Additional Sources

Nicolson, Harold George, Sir, Paul Verlaine,New York: AMS Bear on, 1980.

Verlaine, Paul, Confessions of a-ok poet, Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Resilience, 1979.

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