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Paul Verlaine (1844 - 1896) Poet, Critic
Quote The sky is so pale and the trees so frail Biography
The tempestuous Paul Verlaine was born March 30, 1844 into a staid and well off family, thirteen years into his parent's marriage, in the town of Metz. Paul's father, Nicolas, an army captain was required to travel, so the young boy was left with his doting mother Stéphanie, a farmer's daughter, who spoiled her son and gave the turbulent and talented boy a lot of leeway in raising him. In 1851, after Nicolas left the army, the family moved to Paris where Paul began attending Institution Landry. In school, Verlaine showed promise, especially in Latin, but he was too bored to apply himself in developing his scholastic abilities. His only interest was poetry, which he considered his calling from an early age. Verlaine made his first real attempts at poetry at age 14. After graduating from Lycée Bonaparte in 1862, Verlaine began coursework in law, but he showed absolutely no interest in his studies and instead devoted himself to poetry and exploring the cafes of the Latin Quarter where he began drinking heavily. In 1863, Verlaine published his first poem, Monsieur Prudhomme, in the publication La Revue du progrès moral littéraire, scientifique et artistique. Worried about his son, Nicolas forced Paul to work as a clerk in an insurance agency and later as a clerk in Paris City Hall, but this did nothing to turn Verlaine away from his poetic ambitions or debauched lifestyle. At night, Verlaine worked on his poetry and indulged in the bohemian lifestyle of Parisian cafes, principally Cafe du Gaz, where he discussed the latest poetic techniques with other talented poets like Leconte de Lisle, and Théodore de Banville Stephen Mallarme and Anatole France. In these cafes, Verlaine was especially fond of Absinthe, a hallucinogenic brand of alcohol popular with artists at the time. Even at this early age, Verlaine was emotionally unstable and suffered from wildly fluctuating feelings of hope, fear and despair. After his father's death in 1865, Verlaine enjoyed greater freedom now that he was left only with his mother, who was always very permissive with her wayward son. Later that year, Verlaine fell in love with Elisa Moncomble, an orphaned cousin who the family lived with when they first arrived in Paris. Though she later spurned him, Elisa helped Verlaine publish his first collection, Saturnian Poems, in 1866, comprised of his early adolescent efforts and love poetry inspired by Elisa. The volume, devoid of an original style or voice, met with little success. He also wrote and clandestinely published in 1867 a collection of pornographic poems entitled Friends. Another collection, Gallant Festivals, published 3 years later also met with little success. Shortly after the publication, Verlaine fell in love with Mathilde Maute, a 16-year-old who Verlaine wooed with poems full of aspirations for the stable and serene domestic life he hoped married life would provide them. In 1870, the couple married and Verlaine published The Good Song, a collection comprised mainly of poems inspired by their courtship. Contrary to the sentiments of these poems, Verlaine's married life became one of quarrels, drunkenness and abuse. Shortly after their wedding, Prussian forces defeated Napoleon III and France became a republic. However, in early 1871, a group of citizens took control of Paris and declared it an autonomous commune. Verlaine became a press officer for the revolutionaries. Unfortunately for Verlaine, the commune collapsed 5 months later, and he lived in fear of the French government who had launched a bloody campaign against the commune's leaders. The previous year, a 16-year-old poet named Arthur Rimbaud began corresponding with Verlaine, who then invited the young man to stay with his family in 1871. Verlaine and Rimbaud became extremely close very quickly, despite the fact Mathilde despised the anti-social young visitor, and it was not long before the two men began a homosexual relationship that soon became known to the public. Two months after the birth of Paul's son in October, Verlaine and Rimbaud ran off to Brussels together. The two men spent the better part of the next two years traveling around northern France and Belgium. The relationship between the two unstable poets was extremely stormy; they fought and broke up often. Eventually, they wound up in London where they found plenty of bohemian amusements and a group of admirers who helped Verlaine publish Romance Without Words in 1874, a daring collection of poems composed during his travels with Rimbaud. However, before the book was published, Verlaine shot and lightly wounded Rimbaud during a heated argument, an event that ended their relationship and started Verlaine on the road to faith. Verlaine spent two years in a Belgian prison for the shooting. After he received news that his wife had filed for divorce, Verlaine underwent a religious crisis and converted to Catholicism. He then began composing poems about his religious crisis. Upon his release from prison in 1875, Verlaine visited his mother and then lived for a time among Trappist monks. He then traveled to Stuttgart Germany to convert his former lover Rimbaud, but the pair immediately fell back into their debauched ways, which ended with a violent quarrel. The two men never saw each other again. However, Verlaine's Romance Without Words garnered some positive reviews and helped Verlaine establish his literary reputation. A few months later, Verlaine began teaching French, Latin and drawing at high schools in Stickney and Bournemouth, England where everyone from Tennyson to the local hymn writers admired Verlaine for his piety and dignity. Verlaine spent two years in England before returning to France in September 1877 to begin teaching high school in Rethel, a town near the Belgian border. While there, Verlaine became (platonically) close to one of his pupils, the 19 year old Lucien Létinois, whom Verlaine would soon refer to as his adopted son. After Lucien failed to get into college, the boy went with Verlaine back to England where they both taught high school for a short time. In 1880, the pair joined Lucien's family on a farm near Juniville that Verlaine had bought for them. For the next two years, Verlaine lived as a farmer with Lucien and his family. In 1881, Verlaine published Wisdom at his own expense, a collection of religious poems, many of which were written during the author's imprisonment. Though this collection is considered by some as Verlaine's masterpiece, they sold poorly: only 8 sold the first year and it would take another 20 years for remaining 442 copies to sell out. In an attempt to resume his literary career, Verlaine moved to Paris with Lucien in July 1882. Verlaine was intent now upon living by his pen, but his long absence from Paris and previous scandalous behavior had left him either alienated from, or forgotten by, the current literary establishment. Luckily, an old high school friend, Edmund Lepelletier, let Verlaine take over his job as columnist at a newspaper. Lepelletier also assisted his friend in publishing poems and articles on literary theory in various literary periodicals. After failing as a teacher, Lucien went to work at a factory in Ivry where he contracted typhus. Lucien's death from typhoid fever in April 1883 devastated Verlaine, who began composing poems about the nature love to commemorate his young 'son.' A few months after the boy's death, Verlaine's mother bought the Létinois farm and moved there with her son, who fell into a period of extreme despondency and debauchery. He drank heavily, brought out boys from Paris for his pleasure and violently quarreled with the locals and even his own mother. After a period in jail for these violent outbursts, Verlaine became a vagabond for a time, before rejoining his mother in Paris in the summer of 1885. The following year, Verlaine published Recently and Formerly, a collection of leftover poems from various periods of his life. With a shaky financial situation due to the farm's failure and Verlaine's own extravagances, mother and son moved into a cheap hotel shared with pimps and prostitutes. In early 1886, Verlaine's mother died and his wife was finally granted a divorce, forcing Verlaine to give her what little was left of his family's fortune. Though Verlaine was now living alone in despair and poverty, his literary reputation had already been growing quickly in the French capital. Huysmans' 1884 popular Decadent novel, À rebours, and two articles carried in major periodicals in 1885 exposed Verlaine's work to a broader audience; Verlaine was now being hailed as a leader of the new literary schools of Decadence and Symbolism. Though Verlaine appreciated the attention and his growing esteem, he distanced himself from being associated with either of these two schools. Verlaine himself had started trumpeting other poets such as Rimbaud and Stephen Mallarme in an 1885 series of articles entitled Les poètes maudits. Based on the success of a book of these articles, Verlaine began a fruitful relationship with the publisher Vanier, who bought the unsold copies of Verlaine's previous works and began selling them along with the poet's new publications. Verlaine's literary reputation as one of the most influential and innovative poets in French literature of the period was solidified in 1888 with the publication of Paul Verlaine et les poètes symbolistes et décadents written by the prominent academic Jules Lemaître. The same year Verlaine published Amour, a collection of poems about love inspired by Lucien, he also began a two-year homosexual relationship with the artist F. A. Cazals, which ended when Verlaine left the artist for a female prostitute. Verlaine wrote a great amount of poetry during these later years, but his hard living lifestyle had greatly diminished abilities. Unfortunately, these later works lack the spark, charm and craftsmanship of his early work. Some of the most notable things he wrote during this period was the pornographic collection entitled Femmes, published 1890, and a homoerotic poetry collection, Hombres, that was only published after the author's death. Now that Verlaine's literary reputation was established, he was able to conduct lecture and reading tours throughout Belgium and England in the early 1890's. Unfortunately, these fairly lucrative activities did little to permanently stabilize his financial situation. Other than writing and lecturing, Verlaine spent most of his days in cafes in front of a glass of Absinthe, perhaps receiving homage from a young poet, and then spending what little money he had left on prostitutes. During these later years, Verlaine set up separate households with two of his favorite middle-aged female prostitutes, splitting time between them. Sadly, by this time, Verlaine was also spending a great deal of time in public charitable hospitals recovering from a variety of ailments. Since the doctors were lenient with him, Verlaine enjoyed these hospital stays because they provided him the peaceful and stable life that had so long eluded him. Verlaine's own growing network of admirers often provided the author with money and successfully petitioned the French government to provide a permanent pension for the ailing poet. In 1894, Verlaine said that he was retiring from poetry after the publication of In the Limbs, but he nevertheless continued to write and publish poetry until a few days before his death. As he was on his deathbed, the French literary world elected Verlaine 'Prince of Poets.' After confessing to a priest and receiving last rites, Paul Verlaine died of pulmonary congestion January 8, 1896 in a seedy hotel home to many prostitutes; even in death exemplifying the strange mixture of religion and debauchery so characteristic of his life and work. Over three thousand people in Paris attended his funeral a few days later. He is buried in the church Saint-‚Étienne du Mont, to rest forever in the same section of Paris where his career in both literature and debauchery began - the Latin Quarter.
Themes: Salvation in love. He looked for salvation in his early loves, hoping that his beloved could save him from himself and his errant ways. Later he tried to find this salvation in the love of God. He often wrote about unrequited love (of his lovers or wife) and forbidden love, which was the subject of his last accomplished poems. His handling of these themes are not particularity profound, but the beauty of the imagery and language give the poems a resonance and force. Style: He was one of the first poets to focus on the pure musicality and rhythm of his native language without concern for classical forms. Though his innovations in rhythm provided the foundation for free verse, he always thought rhyme was necessary for French poetry. His influence is so pervasive that a modern reader may not notice the innovations he developed because his rhythms, imagery and way of depicting his themes are now so common in modern poetic language. His talent did not lie in the depth of his subject matter but in his mastery of the sound of his native French. Major Works Songs without Words (1874)A collection of impressionistic sketches written while on the road with Rimbaud that experiment with imagery, rhythm and the sound of language to express the excitement and various emotions Verlaine experienced during his journey. Sagesse (1880) Love (1888)
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