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Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) |
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French poet and leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry. Paul
Verlaine's life style wavered between criminality and naive innocence;
he married a young girl in 1870 but after a year fell in love with the
young poet Arthur Rimbaud, who was seventeen. With Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire
he formed the so-called Decadents. Although Verlaine maintained the outward form of classical poetry, his
work opened ways for free verse. Critics complained that they could not understand what he was trying to say. An ancient faun of terra-cotta built Paul Verlaine was born in Metz, northeast France, where his father, an infantry captain, happened to be stationed. Paul was the only child, but there lived also with the family an orphan cousin, Elisa Déhee, whom the young poet later loved passionately. In 1851 the family moved to Paris, where Verlaine was sent to the lycée. At the age of 14 he read Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, which influenced deeply his writing aspirations. He studied law, but gave up after two years and entered the civil service at the City Hall. In 1862 Verlaine received his bachelor's degree. Among Verlaine's friends were a number of Parnassian poets, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Louis Xavier de Ricard, Catulle Mendès, and François Cippée; he also imitated their classical grandeur in his early works. At the ale houses of the rue Soufflot he found company for long discussions and for drinking absinthe – the drink that was eventually to lead him to a hospital bed. Verlaine's father refused to finance his son's extravagances. In his first book, Poèmes saturniens (1866, Saturnine Poems), Verlaine asked, "Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?" Fêtes galantes
(1869, Gallant Festivities), which had a 18th-century setting, was published after the death
of his beloved cousin. Although Verlaine had homosexual tendencies, he
married in 1870 Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, and shared the same
dwelling sometimes with his wife, his in-laws, and with the younger
poet Arthur Rimbaud. For Mathilde Verlaine wrote La Bonne Chanson (1870, The Good Song),
revealing his anxieties and hopes for happiness, but he also showed a
violent temper, attacked his wife and once he hurled his infant son
Georges against a wall. When Verlaine began an affair with Rimbaud, the
marriage was shattered. In
this impossible situation Verlaine left his
family to live a Bohemian life with his poet friend in London and
Brussels. Their relationship ended on July 12, 1873 when Verlaine,
drunk and desolate, tried to shoot Rimbaud in the wrist after a
quarrel. He spent 16 months in Mons city jail, cell no. 252, where
there was a bed and a table. Moreover, he was allowed books, ink, and
paper. During his imprisonment
Verlaine studied Shakespeare and Don Quixote and wrote Romances sans paroles
(1874,
Songs Without Words). "How sad—how sad my heart today, / Because of One
so far away. // For me, no balm can e'er console, / Who made an exile
of my soul. // For me whose soul, for me whose heart, / Willed we
should ever live apart." (from 'Forgotten Airs,' Romances Without Words, in Paul
Verlaine: His Absinthe-Tinted Song, p. 112) This collection, published in no more than a few hundred copies,
is considered the masterpiece, where Verlaine finally found his poetic
voice,
the music of the lines. Cellulairement (Cellulary), which he also composed in prison, was not published during his lifetime. The manuscript was rediscovered in 2004. After being released in January 1875, Verlaine again met Rimbaud, who soon found out that his former friend was a Catholic. Rimbaud first proceeded to get Verlaine drunk and make him blaspheme against his faith. According to one story he then knocked him down with a club. Verlaine moved to England where he taught French before returning to France in 1877 to teach at the college of Rethel. From this period date most of the poems in Sagesse. It contains verse of religious sentiment that reflects the poet's conversion to Roman Catholicism. In 1879 he gave up teaching, adopted a pupil, Lucien Létinois, and they ran a farm together. The farm went bankrupt, and Verlaine returned to Paris. His second attempt to live in the country, this time at Coulommes, also ended in bankruptcy. In 1883 Verlaine's favorite pupil died of typhus, and in March 1885
he was sentenced to a month's imprisonment for threats of violence
against his mother; she died in January 1886. Moreover, Mathilde
divorced him in 1885. Much of this year he spent in a drunken stupor. Amour
(1888) looked back to Lucien's death. Although relapsing into drink,
Verlaine was celebrated at the same time as the leading poet of France.
He published such critical works as Les Poètes maudits
(1884, The Accursed Poets), short biographical studies of poets, short stories and sacred
and profane verse. He often utilized old poems, which he
earlier had not regarded worthy of publication. Verlaine was for long periods in public hospitals, continued to drink, and slept in slums. He suffered from rheumatism, cirrhosis, gastritis, jaundice, diabetes, and cardiac hypertrophy. At Broussais Hospital in the rue Didot, his favorite place, he was visited by André Gide, Huysmans and many other friends, including the writer and artist Frédéric-Auguste Cazals. "On one occasion Cazals himself was in the hospital, and the two friends would spend all their time together, Cazals sketching Verlaine in his blue dressing-gown and nightcap, and Verlaine smoking his pipe, editing his early verses or singing in his cracked voice some libidinous chanson of the Paris boulevards." (Paul Verlaine by Harold Nicolson, Constable & Company, 1921, pp. 173-174) In his last years, Verlaine wasted whatever royalties he earned on
two middle-aged women prostitutes, named Philomene and Caroline, he
lived with alternately for brief periods When they
competed with each other to win his favor, he politely praised the
beauty of them both. Verlaine also frequented a gay man,
Bibi-la-Purée, who was an occasional thief. Bibi had become especially
famous for stealing umbrellas. "The boy had diabolical powers of
seduction," Verlaine said in an interview, following the news of
Rimbaud's death, "for me, Rimbaud is an ever-living reality, a sun
aflame within me, a sun that will not suffer eclipse." (Verlaine's Rimbaud by D. J. Carlile, 2016) However, in his autobiographical
writings he denied any sexual relationship with Rimbaud. The British writer and pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis
(1859-1939) described Verlaine as "a psychosexual hermaphrodite," who
was torn between homosexual and heterosexual attractions. (Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis, 1906, p. 26)
A few years before his death, Verlaine found himself in a situation, in
which the public concentrated on his literary achievement, rather than
his turbulent personal life. His early
collections of poetry were rediscovered and in 1894 he was elected
France's Prince of Poets, after the death of Leconte de Lisle.
Moreover, the Paris police commissioner gave orders to his officers
that Verlaine was never to be arrested, no matter what he did. Verlaine
died of pulmonary congestion in Paris, on January 8, 1896, at the age
of 51.
He was living with a former prostitute, Eugenie Krantz. The dying
Verlaine's last words to the young poet Henri Cornuty were, "Be pure of
heart, open to the world of miracles." (Hesitant Fire: Selected Prose of Max Jacob, translated and edited by Moishe Blanck and Maria Green, 1991, p. 123)
Verlaine's funeral was a public event with thousands of Parisians
following
the casket to the Batignolles cemetery. Philomene and Eugenie were
present too, but Caroline was found "stark naked in front of
Verlaine's house in the Rue Descartes, shrieking that she was his muse.
(Absinthe: The Cocaine of the Nineteenth Century by Doris Lanier, 2004, p. 67) The magazine La Plume dedicated a memorial issue to him. Despite his fame, Verlaine died
in poverty. Edmond Lepelletier, who was Verlaine's friend from schoolboy times, published in 1907 a biography on him, Paul Verlaine: sa vie, son œuvre.
"Adopts an apologetic tone with condescending attitude to both Mathilde
Mauté (ex-Madame Verlaine) and Rimbaud," a reviewer said of this
often-quoted book. "Contains numerous inaccuracies and doubtful
assertions." (A Critical Bibliography of French Literature: Volume V: The Nineteenth Century: In Two Parts: Part I, edited by David Baguley, 1994, p. 1127) Compared to his near-contemporary poets, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Verlaine has remained less celebrated. For further reading: Paul Verlaine by Stefan Zweig (1913); Verlaine by Ernest Delahaye (1919); Paul Verlaine by Stefan Zweig (1913); Paul Verlaine by Harold Nicholson (1921); Paul Verlaine, sa vie, son oeuvre by Edmond Lepelletier (1923); Verlaine by P. Martino (1924; 1951); A Poet Under Saturn by Marcel Coulon (1932); Mémoires de ma Vie by Mathilde Mauté (1935); Verlaine: Prince of Poets by Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson (1958); Magies de Verlaine by E. Zimmerman (1967); Verlaine: A Study in Parallels by A.E. Carter (1969); Verlaine by J. Richardson (1971); Verlaine by C. Chadwick (1973); English Interludes by Cecily Mackworth (1974); Paul Verlaine and the Decadence, 1882-90 by Philip Stephan (1975); Paul Verlaine: Histoire d'un Corps by Alain Buisine (1995); Arthur Rimbaud et Paul Verlaine, edited by Joon-Oh Lee (1996); Arthur Rimbaud by Benjamin Ivry (1998); Poétique de Verlaine: "en sourdine, à ma manière" by Arnaud Bernadet (2014); 'Preface' by Nicolas Valazza, in Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Selection of his Verse, translated by Samuel N. Rosenberg; edited by Nicolas Valazza (2019); 'Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine,' in Parallel Lives: from Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath by Jeffrey Meyers (2024) - Décadents: a term applied narrowly to the group of French poets whose leaders were Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. The group became known for their interest in the morbid, perverse and bizarre, their freedom of morals and often sensational social behavior, and hyperaesthetic temperaments. In their writings, they placed emphasis upon creative self-expression and underlined the principle of art for art's sake. Their review Le Décadent, whose title consecrated a label originally coined by hostile critics, was founded in 1886. See also: Oscar Wilde, the English counterpart of this phenomenon. Suom.: Verlainelta on suomenettu mm. valkoima Paul Verlainen runoja (1965) sekä runoja teokseen Tuhat laulujen vuotta, toim. Aale Tynni (1974). Selected works:
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