Les Poètes maudits

Prose works such as Les Poètes maudits, short biographical studies of six poets, among them Mallarmé and Rimbaud; Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, brief biographies of contemporary writers, most of which appeared in 1886; Mes Hôpitaux, accounts of Verlaine’s stays in hospitals; Mes Prisons, accounts of his incarcerations, including the story…

…the series of articles entitled Les Poètes maudits (“The Accursed Poets”) published by Verlaine in 1883 and the praise lavished on him by J.-K. Huysmans in his novel À rebours (“The Wrong Way”) in 1884 led to his wide recognition as the most eminent French poet of the day. A…

…had written about him in Les Poètes maudits (1884) and had published a selection of his poems. These had been enthusiastically received, and in 1886, unable to discover where Rimbaud was or to get an answer from him, Verlaine published the prose poems, under the title Illuminations, and further verse…

published in Paul Verlaine’s Les Poètes maudits (1884). Written in traditional alexandrine lines, the poem is far from traditional in its subject matter; it arbitrarily assigns to each of the vowels a different, specific colour.