Paul Verlaine

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The French poet Paul Marie Verlaine (1844-1896), one of the most exquisite lyric poets in the history of French literature, ranks with Rimbaud and Mallarmé as one of the major French symbolists of the 19th century.

Paul Verlaine was born in Metz on March 30, 1844. He was the son of an army captain. Verlaine attended the Lycée Bonaparte (today Lycée Condorcet) in Paris, where his favorite subjects were French and Latin. At the age of 14, he sent Victor Hugo his earliest known poem, La Mort. By 1862, the year he received his baccalaureate degree, Verlaine had already developed a disastrous taste for drink that marred his life. In 1866 he published his first collection of verse under a title apparently borrowed from Baudelaire: Poèmes saturniens. Nevermore, Mon rêve familier, and especially Chanson d'automne revealed the lovely lyricism and delicate sadness characteristic of many of Verlaine's best poems.

Verlaine's succeeding volumes contained many exquisite lyrics. Fêtes galantes of 1869 (inspired in part by French painters of the 18th century whose work he had seen at the Louvre) included Clair de lune, Mandoline, and Colloque sentimental. La Bonne chanson (1870/ 1872), intended as a sort of epithalamium for his illstarred marriage to Mathilde Mauté, contained La Lune blanche. Romances sans paroles (1873) included Il pleure dans mon coeur and O triste, triste était mon âme, lyrics that brought poetry close to music. Sagesse (1880), Verlaine's best-known collection, included a sonnet sequence beginning "Mon Dieu m'a dit: 'Mon fils il faut m'aimer … "' that affords some of the finest religious verse in the French language. The same volume included a poem describing his lonely sensation at entering the prison of Mons after shooting Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist ("Un grand sommeil noir tombe sur ma vie") and his most famous poem ("Le ciel est par-dessus le toit"), which analyzed his perceptions and thoughts in his prison cell.

In 1884 Verlaine published a volume of criticism (Les Poètes maudits) that helped bring the emerging symbolists to the attention of the public. He produced more than a dozen further collections of verse before his death, none of them comparable to his earlier volumes. Jadis et Naguère (1885) included Langueur, a poem seen as a sort of manifesto of decadence, and Art poétique, a poem that expresses some of his essential ideas on poetry. In it he proclaimed the beauty of le vers impair (the verse of an uneven number of syllables: 5-7-9-11, instead of the usual 6-8-10-12) and urged that poetry be fugitive and intangible like mint and thyme on the morning wind.

Verlaine spent his last years as a moral and physical derelict, moving in and out of hospitals until his death in Paris on Jan. 8, 1896. But in 1894 he had been elected Prince of Poets, and he was given a public funeral.

Verlaine was known during his lifetime for the beauty and delicacy of his finest verse, for his association with Arthur Rimbaud, and for his generally dissipated and vagabond existence. In his last years "le Pauvre Lèlian, " as he called himself from an anagram of his name, was considered a picturesque incarnation of the decadent poet.

Further Reading

English translators of Verlaine's poetry include Ashmore Wingate and C. F. Maclntyre. Harold Nicolson, Paul Verlaine (1921), and Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, Verlaine: Fool of God (1957), are biographies. Antoine Adam's fine study of Verlaine was translated by Carl Morse and published as The Art of Paul Verlaine (1963). Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (trans. 1950; new ed. 1970), is an authoritative study of the forces that shaped modern French poetry and includes a useful critique of Verlaine.

Additional Sources

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

Verlaine, Paul, Confessions of a poet, Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979.

Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), a poet of contrasts, moods, and musical lyricism, is generally considered to be one of the major French poets of the second half of the 19th c. With Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, he is sometimes seen as a precursor of the French Symbolist poets of the 1880s. If, however, the idea of French literary Symbolism is viewed in the broader context of innovative and musical approaches to poetic creation—from Baudelaire to Valéry—Verlaine may be regarded as a direct contributor to Symbolist poetics.

He was born in Metz, into a middle-class family, and died in penury in Paris, a generally respected literary figure but dependent on financial support from individuals and public authorities. He was educated at the Lycée Bonaparte (Condorcet) in Paris, and from 1862 studied at the Faculté de Droit. His academic progress was limited by his preference for café-life, literature, and drink; in 1864 his father withdrew him from the university and he was employed by an insurance company and then as a clerk at the Hôtel de Ville. He published poems in Le Parnasse contemporain (1866) [see Parnasse]. An unstable, contradictory, often unpredictable character, he lived a life of extremes, by turns violent and loving, rebellious and orderly. He met Mathilde Mauté in 1867 and was married to her in 1870. He served in the Garde Nationale during the seige of Paris, 1870-1, and was associated with the Commune.

In 1871 he invited Rimbaud to Paris, and thereafter began a series of often tempestuous escapades with him. His marriage, already unstable, broke up after the birth of their son, and was legally ended in 1874. In 1872-3 Verlaine and Rimbaud lived for a time in Brussels and then in London, where Verlaine—having been born in Metz, by now ceded to Germany—opted for French nationality. During this time Verlaine wrote the poems of Romances sans paroles. After their return to Brussels, Verlaine wounded Rimbaud with a revolver during a drunken quarrel in July 1873, and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. During his imprisonment he wrote ‘Art poétique’, and following his separation from Mathilde he turned to the Catholic faith into which he had been born, a ‘conversion’ which was at the origin of poems in the collection Sagesse.

Following his release from prison, in January 1875, he eventually returned to England, where he held teaching posts in Stickney, Lincolnshire, and Bournemouth. He subsequently taught in various schools, including Notre-Dame in Rethel near Reims, where he befriended a pupil, Lucien Létinois, and at Lymington, Isle of Wight. He attempted farming, unsuccessfully. In 1885 he was fined and briefly imprisoned for attacking his widowed mother. In later years he suffered increasing ill health, including rheumatism, diabetes, and syphilis. However, he was becoming widely recognized as a poet of distinction, and in the late 1880s the poètes décadents [see Decadence] claimed him as a leader. He gave public lectures in several countries, and on the death of Leconte de Lisle in 1894 he was elected ‘Prince des Poètes’.

Verlaine's main poetical works were Poèmes saturniens (1866), Fêtes galantes (1869), La Bonne Chanson (1870, 1872), Romances sans paroles (1873-4), Sagesse (1880-1), Jadis et naguère (1885), Amour (1888), Parallèlement (1889), Bonheur (1891), Chansons pour elle (1891). His prose works include Les Poètes maudits (1884), short critical studies of several poets, including himself, under the anagram ‘Pauvre Lelian’. His best work retains a wide appeal, for its musical qualities, its simplicity and directness of expression, its subtle, lyrical evocations of shades of feeling and desire. Verlaine was not a thinker, but a creator of moods, derived from his own sensations and shifting aspirations. A cautiously experimental prosodist, he rejected vers libre, preferring vers libéré, which he defined authoritatively in ‘Art poétique’. This poem, published in Jadis et naguère, emphasizing musicality, fluidity, half-tones, variety of rhyme, and avoidance of grandiloquence, was an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the nature of poetry and to the development of French poetic technique since Romanticism. Verlaine's naïvety was far removed from artlessness, and his troubled life left a legacy of fine poetry.

[Bernard Swift]

Bibliography

• A. Adam. Verlaine (1953)
• V. P. Underwood, Verlaine et l'Angleterre (1956)

Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Born	30 March 1844(1844-03-30) Metz, France
Died	8 January 1896 (aged 51) Paris, France
Occupation	Poet
Genres	Symbolist
Influences Charles Baudelaire, Charles Leconte de Lisle, Arthur Rimbaud, Arthur Schopenhauer, Victor Hugo

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Paul-Marie Verlaine (French pronunciation: [vɛʁˈlɛn]; 30 March 1844 - 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Marriage and military service 1.3 Relationships with Rimbaud and Létinois 1.4 Final years 2 Style 3 Portrayals 4 Works 5 References 6 External links 7 See also

Biography

Early life

Born in Metz, 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 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 Ricard ^[1] (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, Theodore de Banville, Francois Coppee, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendes, etc.. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866),^[2] though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality.

Marriage and military service

Verlaine's private life spills over into his work, beginning with his love for Mathilde Mauté. Mauté became Verlaine's wife in 1870. At the proclamation of the Third Republic in the same year, Verlaine joined the 160th battalion of the Garde nationale, turning Communard on 18 March 1871.

He 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.

Relationships with Rimbaud and Létinois

Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from Arthur Rimbaud. By 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, and effectively abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover.^[2] Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872. In July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at 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, where he underwent a 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 colored 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 traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher and produced another successful collection, Sagesse. He returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois and who inspired Verlaine to write further poems. Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883.

Final years

Verlaine's last years saw his descent into drug addiction, alcoholism, and poverty. 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.

His poetry was admired and recognized as ground-breaking, serving as a source of inspiration to composers such as Gabriel Fauré, who set many of his poems to music, including La bonne chanson, and Claude Debussy, who set six of the Fêtes galantes poems to music, forming part of the mélodie collection known as the Recueil Vasnier.^[3] The Belgian-British composer Poldowski (daughter of Henryk Wieniawski) set 21 of Verlaine's poems.

Paul Verlaine died in Paris at the age of 51 on 8 January 1896; he was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles.

Style

Verlaine in a café

Much of the French poetry produced during the fin de siècle was characterized as "decadent" for its lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Verlaine used the expression poète maudit ("accursed poet") in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or were ignored by the critics. But with the publication of Jean Moréas' Symbolist Manifesto in 1886, it was the term symbolism which was most often applied to the new literary environment. Along with Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Albert Samain and many others began to be referred to as "Symbolists". These poets would often share themes that parallel Schopenhauer's aesthetics and notions of will, fatality and unconscious forces, and used themes of sex (such as prostitutes), the city, irrational phenomena (delirium, dreams, narcotics, alcohol), and sometimes a vaguely medieval setting.

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.

Portrayals

Numerous artists painted Verlaine's portrait. Among the most illustrious were Henri Fantin-Latour, Antonio de la Gándara, Eugène Carrière, Gustave Courbet, Frédéric Cazalis, and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.

The time Verlaine and Rimbaud spent together was the subject of the 1995 film Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland and with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on his play. Verlaine was portrayed by David Thewlis.

by Edouard Chantalat, 1898

by Edmond Aman-Jean

by Courbet

by Eugène Carrière, 1890

Works

Verlaine's Complete Works are available in critical editions from the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

• Poèmes saturniens (1866)
• Les Amies (1867)
• Fêtes galantes (1869)
• La Bonne Chanson (1870)
• Romances sans paroles (1874)
• Sagesse (1880)
• Les Poètes maudits (1884)
• Jadis et naguère (Verlaine) (1884)
• Amour (1888)
• Parallèlement (1889)
• Dédicaces (1890)
• Femmes (1890)
• Hombres (1891)
• Bonheur (1891)
• Mes hôpitaux (1891)
• Chansons pour elle (1891)
• Liturgies intimes (1892)
• Mes prisons (1893)
• Élégies (1893)
• Odes en son honneur (1893)
• Dans les limbes (1894)
• Épigrammes (1894)
• Confessions (1895)

References

1. ^ Shapiro, Norman R., One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine, University of Chicago Press, 1999
2. ^ ^{a b} "Paul Verlaine". Litweb.net. http://www.litweb.net/biography/425/Paul_Verlaine.html. Retrieved 2007-07-18. 
3. ^ Rolf, Marie. Page 7 of liner notes to Forgotten Songs by Claude Debussy, with Dawn Upshaw and James Levine, Sony SK 67190.

• Paul Verlaine, Correspondance générale : [Vol.] I, 1857-1885 (edited and annotated by Michael Pakenham). Paris : Fayard, 2005. 16 x 24 cm. 1,122 pages. ISBN 2-213-61950-6

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paul Verlaine

French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Paul Verlaine

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Paul Verlaine

• Paul Verlaine at Find a Grave
• Works by Paul Verlaine at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Paul Verlaine at Poésie française
• Works by Paul Verlaine in PDF at Livres et Ebooks
• Free scores of works by Paul Verlaine in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Resignation and Other Poems at New Translations (English)
• La Nouvelle Décadence - Extensive online library of Verlaine translations and biographies
• Four poems by Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro, with original French texts

See also

• Our Lady of La Salette

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