The Saturnian Poems E-Book

Sophie Chetrit

• Herausgeber: BrightSummaries.com
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 28

Beschreibung

What should we learn from The Saturnian Poems, this first poetic collection written by Verlaine? Find everything you need to know about this work in a complete and detailed analysis.
You will find in particular in this card:
- A complete summary of the collection
- An explanation of the literary context
- An analysis of the specificities of the work: The original poetic form; The themes of melancholy, time and love
A reference analysis to quickly understand the meaning of the work.

Leseprobe

PAUL VERLAINE

FRENCH POET

•Born in 1844 in Metz

•Died in 1896 in Paris

•Some of his works:

°Fêtes galantes (1869), a collection of poetry

°Romances sans paroles (1874), collection of poetry

°Les poètes maudits (1884), essay

Born in 1844, Paul Verlaine was a poet of the second half of the 19th century. He was born in Metz in 1844 into a middle-class family and went to Paris to study law. He studied law there and later worked in an insurance company and as an expeditionary at the Paris City Hall. In 1866, he published the Poèmes Saturniens. Three years later, his second collection Fêtes galantes was published, evoking Watteau's 18th century. He married Mathilde Mauté, a young girl from the Parisian upper middle class, in 1870.

After the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune uprising in 1871, Verlaine, who had met Arthur Rimbaud, left his wife to follow him to England and then to Belgium. During his travels, he wrote a new collection, Romances sans paroles. The two poets had a passionate relationship until the famous evening of July 1873, when Verlaine shot his lover and was sentenced to two years in prison, which he served in Brussels and Mons. He then converted to Catholicism and on his release from prison in 1875, he went back to England for a while where he became a teacher, only to return to the Ardennes, to Rethel, where he became friends with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who died in 1883.

The following year, Verlaine published Les poètes maudits, a book in which three poets were honoured: Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. His fame grew and he was proclaimed the “Prince of Poets”, even though he became worn out and led a debauched life until his death from lung congestion in 1896.

THE SATURNIAN POEMS

VERLAINE'S FIRST COLLECTION OF POETRY

•Genre: poetry

•Reference edition: VERLAINE P., Poèmes Saturniens, Gallimard, coll. “Folio”, 2010, 96 p.

•Themes: time, love, melancholy, music, poetry

Paul Verlaine published the Poèmes saturniens at the age of twenty-two, although he is said to have begun writing them while still in high school, at the age of sixteen. He had first thought of calling this collection Poèmes et Sonnets, before deciding on the name we know today, in reference to the Roman god and the dark and melancholic planet. Edited on a self-publishing basis and published in 1866 by Alphonse Lemerre, the Poèmes saturniens is Paul Verlaine's first collection of poetry in verse. However, this work had only a limited reception, not being considered at the time as a major literary event.

During this period, Verlaine frequented Parisian literary circles and contributed to the first Parnasse contemporain (1866), a collective collection of poems that was the manifesto and illustration of the Parnasse movement. This was a movement in opposition to the Romantic outpourings, which promoted modern poetic art based on formal perfection and impersonal lyricism. His masters, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire and Théodore de Banville, had a strong influence on Verlaine's poetry.

Little is known about the genesis of this collection, but the Saturnian Poems, like Les Fleurs du mal