VERLAINE, PAUL. - Poet and initiator of the French Symbolist movement, b. at Metz on 30 March 1844, d. in Paris on 8 January 1896.
In Paris, where his family had moved in 1851, V. began to write; from 1864 to 1866 he held a municipal post, from which he was dismissed for his revolutionary sympathies. His first volumes of verse met with little success: *Poèmes saturniens* (1866); *Fêtes galantes* (1869); *La bonne chanson* (1870), in which a new tone, at once ironic and sincerely moved, emerges from Parnassian and Baudelairian reminiscences. Then V.’s life was overwhelmed by alcohol abuse and by his morbid passion for Arthur Rimbaud, the precocious, prodigious poet whom he had discovered and with whom he became the initiator of Symbolism. They fled together to Belgium and to London; in Brussels, on the return journey after a year of dissipation, V. wounded his friend in a quarrel and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (1873). He emerged from prison at the beginning of 1875, detoxified or nearly so, once more believing in the faith of his childhood; for some years he devoted himself to teaching, at Stickney, Bournemouth (England) and Rethel. Meanwhile there appeared *Romances sans paroles* (1874), verses perfectly consonant in their vibrant musicality with the precepts of *Art poétique* (which was however published only ten years later, in *Jadis et naguère*), and *Sagesse* (1881), an admirable anthology of the anxieties and remorse that accompanied his religious crisis.
Another friendship (for the pupil Lucien Létinois) once more cast V. into the arms of his demon, driving him to buy a farm and to embark on an ill-starred agricultural experiment. After the boy’s death V. suffered fresh legal troubles, arising from a drunken quarrel with his mother (1885), and finally sank into destitution in Paris, descending ever lower into vice, while an ever-growing chorus of admiration and enthusiasm gathered round his work, which was now running out in *Parallèlement* (1889), reflecting his contemporary impulses towards God and sin, and in other collections of verse, more crude and uneven (*Amour*, *Chansons pour elle*, *Bonheur*, *Liturgies intimes*), as well as in the uneven and capricious prose of some books of memoirs (*Les poètes maudits*, 1888; *Mes hôpitaux*, 1891; *Mes prisons*, 1893; *Confessions*, 1895; *Voyage en France*, 1907).