Baudelaire Rimbaud and Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems

"Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems" carries with it a strong selection of each poet's better known poems. Collecting these three, specifically, is in tune with their own sense of language and image. The translations work splendidly for all three poets, as executed by several different translators. As such, the pieces chosen are encumbered or glorified by their own merit, and not of the hurdles and interpretative biases of language. I first learned of Arthur Rimbaud, ironically, from my religion teacher at a Catholic high school. As the first French poet I was introduced I felt, then, obligated to like his work. However, now, in seeing him compared to the much greater Baudelaire, Rimbaud comes across self-indulgent and meaningless. I gain no pleasure from reading his work, and consider, of these three, him to be far overrated. Paul Verlaine, for me, is somewhere in-between. His romance with Rimbaud (scandalous then, as he dumped his infant daughter and young wife for Rimbaud) luckily did not reduce his poetry to wandering colors and images. Occasionally, he is even cliche: Oh, heavy, heavy my despair Because, because of One so fair. (from Verlaine's "Oh, Heavy, Heavy") And occasionally brilliant: Hills and fences hurry by Blent in greenish-rosy flight, And the yellow carriage-light Blurs all to the half-shut eye (from Verlaine's "Brussels") Baudelaire's prose poem selections are too many here. They do not meet up in quality with his more tightly articulated poetry. The section, "Flowers of Evil," though, is a masterful, though bitter, book within a book. Throughout "Flowers," Baudelaire defies God, but never denies his existence or power, as seen here in "St Peter's Denial," What has God done with all this flood of sacrifices? Which rises to his Seraphim divine? As a tyrant intoxicated with his wine His fearful sleep is haunted by his vices. I fully recommend "Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems." While I cannot so I am an exuberant fan of any of them, their influence on poets I completely embrace I acknowledge, and am pleased to have become better aware of them. Anthony Trendl HungarianBookstore.com

I think I have a better instinctual understand of these "decadents" who were the clear marking of the break between the old aesthetic rationality and the surrealism, symbolism, etc. that followed--those who actually blend the periods, smudge and blur the two worldviews, like Poe and Blake and, here, Baudelaire do. I like Baudelaire's phantasmagoria, his exoticism put in service of delivering a concrete insight. And I especially like it when the poetic histrionics of "Flowers of Evil" give way to the fascinating prose poems--like "The Confiteor of the Artist" or the marvellous war-against-poetry volley "The Courteous Marksman." Other fine ones (reminding me also of Lovecraft)--"The Evil Glazier," "At One O'Clock in the Morning," "Solitude." There's misanthropy, insight and occult broodishness here of the most useful sort. Rimbaud and Verlaine didn't grip me as strongly--I appreciate that they stretched artistic boundaries, but what they have done intrinsically I don't find as rich. Rimbaud's religious ravings and visions I find intelligent but obscurant (like Wallace Stevens)--he's doing some constructive deconstruction, but it's hardly readable (though I do like the more coherent symbolism of the famed "Drunken Boat"). And Verlaine, while he has the occasional dead-on whimsical insight, is a bit too florid in verbiage, classical in form, and even conventional for me. With these latter two poets, I think my concern with translated poetry also must come in at full force--this sort of wordplay and deliberate suggestiveness must be highly dependent on the nuance of the original words, and must therefore lose something considerable in English.--J.Ruch