Paul Verlaine

French poet

• Born: March 30, 1844
• Birthplace: Metz, France
• Died: January 8, 1896
• Place of death: Paris, France

Identity: Gay or bisexual

Biography

Paul Marie Verlaine (vur-lehn) was the son of a former captain of engineers of Napoleon’s army. He was educated in Paris and then secured a minor position with an insurance company, a job that provided a small salary while leaving him time for creative work. In 1870 he married Mathilde Mauté. In the following year he formed the friendship with Arthur Rimbaud that was to affect his life so profoundly. His close relationship with Rimbaud, with whom he was infatuated, would prove extremely important to the development of Verlaine’s mature poetry. With Rimbaud, a much younger man, Verlaine wandered through England, France, and Belgium. He had long been drinking heavily, and the journey ended disastrously when he tried to shoot Rimbaud in an altercation over Verlaine’s wife. This act cost Verlaine two years in prison at Mons, during which time he converted to Catholicism; Rimbaud went to North Africa to begin a dissolute life of drugs and gun-running, eventually contracting syphilis. After his relationship with Verlaine, he never wrote again. When Verlaine returned to France in 1875, his wife divorced him. He then went to England again to earn his living as a teacher of French.

Verlaine had begun his poetic career in the Parnassian school, led by Leconte de Lisle, whose members aimed at a severity in poetry. Soon he slipped away from them into the eighteenth century fantasies of Fêtes galantes. This phase was not Verlaine’s important work. His greatest significance, beginning with Romances Without Words, lies in his contribution to the Symbolist movement.

The poets included in this general movement were at first known as the “decadents,” a term that Verlaine was willing to accept. The name “Symbolists” was suggested by Jean Moréas, and the school derived primarily from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences,” in which nature is described as a “forest of symbols.” Symbolism was a reaction against the austere impersonality of the Parnassians and can perhaps best be described by quoting Stéphane Mallarmé’s comment: “To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem. . . . to suggest it, there is the dream.” Thus Symbolist poetry consists largely of vague suggestions and half-hints, by which the poet tries to express “the secret affinities of things with his soul.” Verlaine said in his poem “The Art of Poetry,” “no color, only the nuance” and “Take eloquence and wring its neck”—a protest against the sonorous declamations of poetry such as Victor Hugo’s. Symbolist practice led inevitably to poetry that became more and more “private” as each poet developed a personal set of symbols, the ultimate, perhaps, being Rimbaud’s insistence that for him each vowel had a different color. Poetry, then, finally came to resemble music; its purpose was the evocation of a mood, and the subject was unimportant. Behind the Symbolists clearly stood the figure of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Baudelaire had introduced to France in the 1860’s. In France the Symbolist movement led to Mallarmé and finally to Paul Valéry; in England it influenced the young William Butler Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Symbolists’ concept of developing a private language has had a profound influence on modern poetry.

Although Verlaine regained sufficient respectability to be invited to lecture in England in 1894, his later years were marked by poverty, drunkenness, and debauchery. He alternated between cafés and hospitals until his death in 1896.

Bibliography

Blackmore, A. M., and E. H. Blackmore, eds. Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This anthology of poetry is preceded by an introduction, notes on text and translations, a select bibliography, and a chronology.

Ivry, Benjamin. Arthur Rimbaud. Bath, Somerset, England: Absolute Press, 1998. A biography of Rimbaud which details his two-year affair with Verlaine. Ivry delves deeply into the relationship, and especially its sexual aspects including possible dalliances with other men, misogynistic outbursts, and graphically sexual poems.

Lehmann, John. Three Literary Friendships: Byron and Shelley, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. New York: Henry Holt, 1984. An examination of the way these friendships influenced each poet’s work. J. R. Combs, commenting for Choice magazine, notes, “[Lehmann] argues convincingly that after Verlaine and Rimbaud became friends and lovers, they became more productive literarily.”

Lepelletier, Edmond Adolphe de Bouhelier. Paul Verlaine: His Life, His Work. Translated by E. M. Lang. New York: AMS Press, 1970. The only English translation of the hefty 1909 biography.

Nicolson, Harold George. Paul Verlaine. 1921. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1997. This venerable biography remains useful.

Robb, Graham. “Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Their Season in Hell.” New England Review 21, no. 4 (Fall, 2000): 7-20. An excerpt from Rimbaud, a biography of nineteenth century poet Arthur Rimbaud by Graham Robb, is presented. The selection features an altercation Rimbaud experienced with his friend and lover, poet Paul Verlaine, in which violence broke out after Rimbaud announced his intention to leave Verlaine and return to his wife and children.

Sorrell, Martin. Introduction to Selected Poems, by Paul Verlaine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Sorrell’s introduction is useful for beginning students in this bilingual edition of 170 newly translated poems by Verlaine.