Paul Verlaine

Abstractions are weak against realities, things that have happened may change men but they cannot vanquish them. So far everything has been only inchoate power and a foreshadowing threat, but not enchantment

His acute ear heard the oracle which foretold his destiny, but he did not know how to interpret what the Pythian voice had whispered until everything was fulfilled

If poetry is so understood, the boy who wrote the Poèmes Saturniens on his school benches, already saw the reality of life and even the future mask

sensitiveness of soul and reaction to slight and cautious stimulation, and not in an active, wild, subduing force, Verlaine certainly has sensed the deepest fount of the orphic mysteries

They are the early outpouring of creative masculinity and youthful yearning. They are half a question and half an answer to life. They are melancholy and vague, filled with uncertain gleaming and a rustling darkness.

It is not out of intellectual growth or out of the persistent impulse to link the universal to his personality, as in the cases of Schiller, Victor Hugo or Lord Byron, that these soft notes rise

It was she too who staged his last youthful folly by giving him the money for printing the Poèmes Saturniens

exaggeratedly candid and coquetting portrait in prose. Gentle memories, fresh and tender like white roses, creep loosely through all his work, scattering pious
fragrance.

But we in whom these pains re-echo in sweet shudderings—for us, it is fitting that we should feel gratitude.

happiness” is only a word, an unfilled cup in strange hands, and an empty tinkling thing. At any rate, life cut more deeply into his flesh than into that of any other poet of our time