Charles Baudelaire
(1821–1867)
As a Symbolist, French poet Charles Baudelaire claimed to be in revolt against Romantic traditions; however, he was still in bondage to his emotions and his macabre imagination. His poetry, like that of the American Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he felt a mystic kinship, exaggerates Romantic traits by obsessively dwelling on sadness, spiritual weariness, and physical decay. His collection of poems, Flowers of Evil, brought Baudelaire to trial on charges of moral offenses. Before the books were released for sale, six poems had to be literally snipped out of them. In character, Baudelaire was a man of conflicts. He liked to shock the bourgeoisie, and when he once found that some regarded him with horror, he frightened them even more by telling them that he had killed and eaten his father. Baudelaire’s character aside, his poetry is still a vital influence on writers who imitate its exquisite sounds, imagery, and rich, suggestive language. "Invitation to the Voyage" is one of Baudelaire’s few happy lyrics. The "kind land" of dreams that he evokes is Holland, as he imagined it to be from the Dutch paintings he had seen.
Paul Verlaine
(1844–1896)
Paul Verlaine, the leading poet of the second half of the nineteenth century in France, presents a decadent echo of the flamboyant lives of earlier Romantic poets. He spent two years in prison for shooting his young protégé, Arthur Rimbaud, and his addiction to liquor shortened his career and life.
Verlaine was a Symbolist poet, and his intention in poetry was not to state an idea but to suggest an impression or mood through sound. The musical quality that Verlaine achieved with the French language cannot be reproduced, even in the best of translations.
Arthur Rimbaud
(1854–1891)
By the time he was twenty-one years old, Rimbaud had become a poet, escaped from his tyrannical mother, lived as a vagabond, and served time in jail. After Rimbaud sent some poems to the older poet Paul Verlaine, the two began a stormy relationship. At one point Rimbaud was shot and wounded by Verlaine, and soon afterward Rimbaud took up a life of wandering. He became a trader, gun-running and possibly slave-trading in and around Indonesia and Africa. In his absence, his poetry was published by Verlaine, who believed Rimbaud to be dead. While Rimbaud's startling new poems were causing a literary sensation in Paris, their rebellious young author was living in a palm-leaf hut in Abyssinia. Rimbaud later returned to Paris shortly before his death, admitting that his desperate, passionate search for experience, knowledge, and truth was a failure.
