VERLAINE, Vileltin', PAUL (1844-96). A French poet, born at Metz. Little is known of his early life. Before the Franco-Prussian War ho had published POCIMCS saturniens (1865) ; Les fetes galantcs (1860) ; La bonne chanson (1870). After 1870 Verlaine, who had led the traditional Bohemian life in Paris, disappeared for eleven years. In 1881 he reappeared in the public eye as a quasi-Catholic with his Sagesse, perhaps his best known volume. It is a remarkable prod uct of a devout religious mysticism.
From this time to his death in Paris in 1896, Verlaine remained, with the exception of sojourns in England, Belgium. and Holland. among the cafes of the Latin Quarter, drinking absinthe, carousing, and writing verse and journalistic articles. The disordered habits of this modern Villon often led to serious misdemeanors which occasioned his imprisonment, or to long illnesses which confined him in hospitals—experiences which he characteristically described in Iles prisons (1S93) and -lies hopitaux (1891). Dur ing this period he published several volumes of verse, all of them rather small and containing only short poems; Jadis et nague.re (1885) Romances sans paroles (1887) ; Amour (1888) ; Bonhcur Para/le/meat (1889) ; (Man suns pour cite (1S91) ; Chair: dcrnieres poesics (1896). In prose he put forth Les poetes
maudits (1884)—interesting sketches of his lit erary companions of the new school, notably MO Mimic> and Rimbaud; also Confessions and Les ham mes Verlaine is classed with the Symbolists. In his mystic worship of God and of the flesh he appeared by turns avowedly orthodox and hope lessly sensual. As for ideas and the gifts of a concrete imagination, he had none, hut he was an exquisite master of verse. He found new nuanees, and new variations, and his pages ex hibit a suffusing mobility of which French poetry had scarcely been thought capable. He usually wrote impeccably according to the strict est forms: but, like a Symbolist, he indulged at, times in lines of 11 and 13 feet, ignored the in terlacement of rhymes, etc. Altogether Verlaine is by far the greatest French poet Symbolism has yet to claim.
Consult: Brunctiere, L'dvolution de la poesie lyriqne en France, vol. ii. (Paris, 1894) ; Le maitre. Les eantemporains, vol. iv. (lb., 1889); Nordau, Degeneracy (New York, 1894) ; in Fortnightly Perim() (London, 1891) ; Wells, Modern French Literature (Boston, 1897). Ver laine's Works are collected in five volumes (Paris, 1900).