Romances sans paroles 1874 paul verlaine biography
From the Back Cover
Romances sans paroles (1874) marque un tournant radical dans l'oeuvre de Verlaine et dans l'histoire de la poésie française. Ce «petit bouquin», qu'il rédige pendant sa liaison tumultueuse avec Rimbaud et qu'il présente comme une «série d'impressions vagues», est hanté par la tentation du silence. Que peut la parole face à la réalité, dont le sens est fuyant? Comment dire les sentiments d'un moi erratique et opaque à lui-même? Et surtout, comment les dire autrement, après le romantisme, qui les a exaltés, et le Parnasse, qui s'en est méfié? En s'emparant d'un genre désuet, la romance, Verlaine réinvente le beau à partir du banal, renoue avec l'oralité au coeur de l'écrit, et fait du chant l'utopie de la parole poétique. Dossier : 1. Genèse et composition du recueil 2. Réformer la poésie 3. Penser l'art : peinture, musique, poésie 4. Verlaine au début des années 1870 : l'écriture de la dissidence 5. La réception de l'oeuvre au XIXe siècle
About the Author
Né à Metz en 1844, Paul Verlaine arrive à Paris en 1851. Employé dans les assurances puis à l'Hôtel de Ville, il fait la rencontre de Coppée, Heredia et enfin de Rimbaud en 1871. Ils voyagent ensemble en Belgique et en Angleterre. Élu "Prince des poètes" à la mort de Leconte de Lisle en 1894, il meurt à Paris en 1896.
Paul Verlaine was a renowned French poet associated with the Symbolist movement, best known for his works 'Romances sans paroles' and 'Fetes galantes'. His life was marked by personal turmoil and tumultuous relationships.
Vision
Paul Verlaine, a notable figure in the French Symbolist movement in poetry, had a unique vision that was heavily characterized by musicality, sentimentality, and dream-like imagery. His work often blurred the lines between the conscious and the subconscious, the tangible and the intangible, and the explicit and the implicit.
Verlaine saw poetry not just as an art of words, but as an art of sounds, rhythms, and melodies. He believed that the musicality of a poem was just as important, if not more so, than its actual meaning. This is evident in his use of various rhythmic patterns, intricate rhyming schemes, and carefully chosen words that often had a musical quality to them.
He had a particular affinity for the sonnet form, which he considered to be the perfect vehicle for his musical and emotional expression. His sonnets often had a lulling rhythm and a soothing melody, reflecting his vision of poetry as a form of musical composition. He even likened the craft of writing poetry to the art of composing music, with each word and each line playing a specific role in the overall harmony of the poem.
Verlaine's vision also encompassed a deep sense of sentimentality. He was a man of intense emotions, and his poetry often served as an outlet for his feelings of love, despair, longing, and regret. His emotions were not just expressed in his words, but also in the rhythm and melody of his poetry, which often echoed his mood and state of mind. For Verlaine, poetry was a means of emotional expression, a way to give voice to the feelings that he could not express in any other way.
His work is also characterized by a strong sense of dreaminess and ethereality. Verlaine was fascinated by the world of dreams and the subconscious, and he often u French poet (1844–1896) Paul-Marie Verlaine (vair-LEN;French:[pɔlmaʁivɛʁlɛn]; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry. Born in Metz, Verlaine 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 (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. Mathilde 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. 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. Songs without Words (Romances sans paroles) is the book in which, unabashedly, Paul Verlaine becomes himself and, in so doing, becomes the iconic poet of the French nineteenth century. A book of musical sequences, it seeks and finds exquisite purity of expression, best exemplified by “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” the most famous and most inimitable of all French lyric poems. And it is a book of intertwining narratives also, each of which entertains abasements and ecstasies, crises, crimes and expiations. These, in their separate ways, detail the shadowlands of artistic purity. Verlaine adores and defiles his child-bride, Mathilde. He takes to the road with Arthur Rimbaud, the love of his life, his muse, his captive and captor. Exhaustion is everywhere counterpoised with exaltation, squalor with splendor. And yet, in nearly every syllable, the dignity of Poetry and of human affections, proves inviolable.Paul Verlaine
Biography
Early life
Marriage and military service
Relationships with Rimbaud and Létino
Songs Without Words
Paul Verlaine (tr. Donald Revell)Description
Translated by Donald Revell
French on facing pages
About the Author
Reviews
Excerpt
Paul Verlaine was born in Metz, France in 1844, and died in 1896. He began to publish poems and to make a name for himself in Paris in his early twenties. In 1870, he married his child-bride Mathilde, whose very respectable family he time and again outraged with his drunken sprees and outbursts of violence. Everything came to smash in 1871 when Verlaine invited Arthur Rimbaud to Paris. The two poets became lovers and wandered through France, England, and Belgium until 1873. In Brussels, in July of that year, Verlaine shot and wounded Rimbaud in the left wrist. Although the younger poet did not wish to press charges, the law took its course and Verlaine was sentenced to two years’ hard labor. Penniless, Rimbaud walked home to France and finished A Season in Hell. In prison, Verlaine oversaw the proof-reading and publication of Romances sans paroles (1874), re-discovered his Catholic