`Verlaine, possessed by the madnesses of love, brimming over with desires and prayers, the rebel railing against the complacent platitudes of society, of love, of language'.
Jean Rousselot
Verlaine ranks alongside Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France whose work is associated with the early Symbolists, the Decadents, and the Parnassiens. Remarkable not only for his delicacy and 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. This bilingual edition provides the most comprehensive selection of his poetry yet, offering some 170 poems in lively and fresh translations and providing a lucid introduction which illuminates Verlaine's poetic form within the context of French Impressionism and the poetry of sensation.
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Verlaine ranks alongside Baudelaire, Mallarm¿and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France. Remarkable not only for his delicacy and 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. This parallel-text bilingual edition provides the most comprehensive selection of his poetry yet, offeringsome 170 poems in lively and fresh translations and providing a lucid introduction which illuminates Verlaine's poetic form within the context of French Impressionism and the poetry of sensation.
there has been no really substantial selection of Verlaine's work in English ... One of the pleasures this volume affords ia s prolonged chance to examin yet again, through the prism of translation, the different geniuses of the two langauges. Another is to rediscover, thanks to Sorrell's selection, a swath of Verlaine's later poetry, so often occluded in the classic anthologies.