TAGS: Poetry, Literature, Classics, Letters, Modernism, Symbolism, Decadents, French Literature


* Paul Verlaine - Selected Poetry and Erotic Writings (8 books)

PAUL VERLAINE (1844 – 1896) was a French lyric poet first associated with the Parnassians and later known as a leader of the Symbolists.  With Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire he formed the so-called Decadents.  He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

Much of the French poetry produced during the fin de siècle was characterized as "decadent" for its lurid content or moral vision.  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.

Remarkable not only for his exquisitely crafted verse, Verlaine is also the poet of strong emotions and appetites, with an unrivalled gift for the sheer music of poetry, and an inventive approach to its technique.  He was an initiator of modern word-music and marks a transition between the Romantic poets and the Symbolists.  His best poetry broke with the sonorous rhetoric of most of his predecessors and showed that the French language, everyday clichés included, could communicate new shades of human feeling by suggestion and tremulous vagueness that capture the reader by disarming his intellect; words could be used merely for their sound to make a subtler music, an incantatory spell more potent than their everyday meaning.  Explicit intellectual or philosophical content is absent from his best work.  His discovery of the intimate musicality of the French language was doubtless instinctive, but, during his most creative years, he was a conscious artist constantly seeking to develop his unique gift and "reform" his nation’s poetic expression.


The following books are in ePub and/or PDF format as indicated:

* Confessions of a Poet [tr. Wolf & Richardson] (Philosophical Library, 1950) – PDF
* One Hundred and One Poems [tr. Shapiro] (Chicago, 1999) – ePub + PDF
* Poems Under Saturn [tr. Kirchwey] (Princeton, 2011) – ePub + PDF
* Royal Tastes: Erotic Writings [tr. Stone] (Harmony, 1984) – PDF
* Selected Poems [tr. MacIntyre] (California, 1948) – PDF
* Selected Poems [tr. Sorrell] (Oxford, 1999) – PDF
* Sky Above the Roof: Fifty-six Poems [tr. Hill] (Collier, 1962) – PDF
* Women Men: The Secret Poems [tr. Elliot] (Sheep Meadow, 1979) – PDF


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