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Paul-Marie Verlaine ( ; "Verlaine". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. ; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French French poet, writer and critic associated with the Symbolist, Parnassianism, and Decadent movements. He is considered one of the paramount exponents of the fin de siècle in French poetry and international poetry.
Born in Metz to a petit-bourgeois family, Verlaine bore a lifelong interest in the arts, whether literary, musical or visual. His début collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866), were released at the age of twenty-two; they were published by Alphonse Lemerre. Verlaine's tempestuous sexual relationship with young poet Arthur Rimbaud (ten years his junior and under eighteen years, and while he himself had a wife and infant son), a member of the Zutiste, aroused great controversy; the couple peregrinated throughout England and Belgium until their split in 1873, which was caused by him wounding Rimbaud with a revolver. Following trial, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison for battery and sodomy. During his sentence, Verlaine reverted to practising Catholic Church and composed Sagesse (published 1880), Jadis et naguère (published 1884) and Parallèlement (published 1889). As his reputation grew, he became increasingly haunted by guilt and paranoia, lapsing into depression, alcohol and chemical abuse and disease, culminating in his death in Paris from acute pneumonia.
Revered for his lyrical sensibility and subtle nuance, Verlaine is acknowledged as one of the archetypical poètes maudits ('accursed poets'), a turn-of-phrase he popularised but did not coin. His promise was evident even in his early work: his engagement with musicality, fluidity, wordplay, polysemy and prosodical manipulation attracted many admirers. His diverse œuvre is highly eclectic, exploiting the characteristics of the French language; critics have noted interplays with melancholy and 'chiaroscuro', as well as a pioneering of metaphor and allegory. Beyond his apparent elegance and mellifluity is a profound introspection, resonating with many contemporary artists of his time, including those outside the literary sphere (such as Impressionism painters).
Numerous renowned composers, from Nadia Boulanger, Claude Debussy ( Clair de lune inspired the famous third movement of his Suite bergamasque), Frederick Delius, Gabriel Fauré, Léo Ferré, Reynaldo Hahn, Arthur Honegger, Sigfrid Karg-Elert, Charles Koechlin, Jules Massenet, Poldowski, Maurice Ravel, Jeanne Rivet, Camille Saint-Saëns, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Igor Stravinsky, Anna Teichmüller, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edgard Varèse, Louis Vierne and many more, have set Verlaine's poetry to music, or used his body of work as inspiration for their compositions. Verlaine himself was aware of this and apparently pleased; he also wrote a few operatic Libretto.
He was honoured with the title of Prince of Poets in 1894 following a referendum organised by Maurice Barrès consulting various people of letters.
He was educated at the Lycée Impérial Bonaparte (now the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris and then took up a post in the civil service. He spent part of his childhood in the Batignolles district of Paris, particularly at 10 rue Nollet, where he lived with his family. He began writing poetry at an early age, and was initially influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published poem was published in 1863 in La Revue du progrès, a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de RicardShapiro, Norman R., One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine, University of Chicago Press, 1999 (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France, Emmanuel Chabrier, inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros, the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendes and others. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866), though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality.
At the proclamation of the Third Republic in the same year, Verlaine joined the 160th battalion of the Garde nationale, turning Communards on 18 March 1871.
Verlaine became head of the press bureau of the Central Committee of the Paris Commune. Verlaine escaped the deadly street fighting known as the Bloody Week, or Semaine sanglante, and went into hiding in the Pas-de-Calais.
In Brussels on July 12, 1873, in a drunken, jealous rage, Verlaine fired two shots with a pistol at his lover, Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet. As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons for one year and six months, where he underwent a re-conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.
The poems collected in Romances sans paroles (1874) were written between 1872 and 1873, inspired by Verlaine's nostalgically coloured recollections of his life with Mathilde on the one hand and impressionistic sketches of his on-again off-again year-long escapade with Rimbaud on the other. Romances sans paroles was published while Verlaine was imprisoned. Following his release from prison, Verlaine again travelled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher, teaching French, Latin, Greek and drawing at William Lovell's school in Stickney in Lincolnshire.
From there he went to teach in nearby Boston, before moving to Bournemouth. While in England, he produced another successful collection, Sagesse. Verlaine returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems. Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883.
Verlaine's poetry was admired and recognized as ground-breaking, and served as a source of inspiration to composers. Gabriel Fauré composed many mélodies, such as the Cinq mélodies "de Venise" and La bonne chanson, which were settings of Verlaine's poems. Claude Debussy set to music Clair de lune and six of the Fêtes galantes poems, forming part of the mélodie collection known as the Recueil Vasnier; he also made another setting of Clair de lune, and the poem inspired the third movement of his Suite bergamasque.Rolf, Marie. Page 7 of liner notes to Forgotten Songs by Claude Debussy, with Dawn Upshaw and James Levine, Sony SK 67190. Reynaldo Hahn set several of Verlaine's poems as did the Belgian-British composer Poldowski (daughter of Henryk Wieniawski), German composer Anna Teichmüller, and French composer Jeanne Rivet.
Verlaine's drug dependence and alcoholism took a toll on his life. He died in Paris at the age of 51 on 8 January 1896; he was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles (he was first buried in the 20th division, but his grave was moved to the 11th division—on the roundabout, a much better location—when the Boulevard Périphérique was built).Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 48689-48690). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
A bust monument to Verlaine sculpted by Rodo was erected in 1911. It sits in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.
In poetry, the symbolist procedure—as typified by Verlaine—was to use subtle suggestion instead of precise statement (rhetoric was banned) and to evoke moods and feelings through the magic of words and repeated sounds and the cadence of verse (musicality) and metrical innovation.
Verlaine described his typically decadent style in great detail in his poem "Art Poétique," describing the primacy of musicality and the importance of elusiveness and "the Odd." He spoke of veils and nuance and implored poets to "Keep away from the murderous Sharp Saying, Cruel Wit, and Impure Laugh." It is with these lyrical veils in mind that Verlaine concluded by suggesting that a poem should be a "happy occurrence."
An example of Verlaine's subtle use of rhyme, puns and imagery is the untranslatable stanza: " Il pleure dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville. / Quelle est cette langueur / qui pénètre mon coeur ?" This phrase begins with a portmanteau between "Je pleure" (I am crying) and "Il pleut" (It's raining) and continues by carrying through both the emotion and the vowel sound of the "eu" common to "pleure" and "pleut."
Whenever Pasternak was provided with literal versions of things which echoed his own thoughts or feelings, it made all the difference and he worked feverishly, turning them into masterpieces. I remember his translating Paul Verlaine in a burst of enthusiasm like this – L'Art poétique was after all an expression of his own beliefs about poetry.Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time: My Years with Boris Pasternak, (1978). Page 34.
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2022. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2021. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2022. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2021. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
| Princeton University Press, 2011. Translated by Karl Kirchwey. |
| Omnidawn, 2013. Translated by Donald Revell. |
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2020. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2020. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2020. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
| Anvil Press Poetry Ltd, 1979. Translated by Alistair Elliot. |
| Sunny Lou Publishing, 2021. Translated by Richard Robinson. |
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