[In the following excerpt, Richardson provides a critical overview of Verlaine's verse, reputation, and contribution to literature.]

Romances sans paroles, which many consider to be [Verlaine's] finest book, reflects his persistent love for Mathilde; it also bears the ineffaceable mark of Rimbaud. It was Rimbaud whom Verlaine followed as he created an original, unacademic language. Rimbaud advocated pictorial simplicity, a return to popular sources, to simple refrains and simple rhythms. Verlaine followed his guidance, bringing some of his poems close to popular songs, seeking a new simplicity and a new complexity. Just as Rimbaud freed Verlaine from bourgeois domesticity, from suburban mediocrity, so he shook him free from certain literary conventions, and swept him into a splendid adventure: the search for a new poetry. In some ways, Rimbaud was only appealing to instincts and beliefs which were already present: to Verlaine's sympathy for the simple and the popular, to his love of technical experiments, his lifelong pleasure in exploring and exploiting language and syntax, his interest in expressing moods. Verlaine was already a supreme poet of mood; under Rimbaud's influence he attempted to eliminate himself from his work, to record mood and atmosphere without the intervention of self. This was the ultimate refinement of poetry. . . .

[While in prison, Verlaine] wrote 'Kaléidoscope.' As the title suggests, it is a collection of impressions, with no logical connection. Here, before Proust, Verlaine experiences those rare, mysterious, transient moments which have more savour than the actual events which they revive. The setting of the poem cannot be identified. In the last verse, he destroys any lingering vestige of reality, and leaves the whole poem, suspended, in a dream. Like certain poems by Rimbaud, 'Kaléidoscope' catches a world beyond the world. It is in this sort of poem that Verlaine shows the extent of his powers. . . .

The profound charm of Sagesse lies in its obsession with the past. Verlaine's contrition is frail, but it intensifies the forbidden pleasures of the past, the enduring obsession with Rimbaud. When he wrote Sagesse, he honestly believed that he had entered the path of salvation; he had been tempted, but determined that he would not now turn back. But one must distinguish between the man's intentions and the very depth of his soul, which he could not help revealing in poetry. The essential reality is not edifying. There are a few moments in Sagesse when the convert bathes in the purifying love of Christ; and there are many times when he re-lives and regrets the forbidden past. Verlaine was not a hypocrite—but Sagesse presents the two contestants in the unequal fight which God would lose. . . .

Verlaine spent his final years in the cafés and hospitals of Paris. Perpetual drinking and squalid living, illness and disease, had made him, now, a wreck of a human being. His homosexual days were virtually over, but he was torn between two middle-aged women of dubious morals, and for one of them he wrote Le Livre posthume. Here, for a brief moment, his poetic gift returned. But, for the most part, he turned out sadly pedestrian verse; his inspiration had gone, and he was living on his past. . . .

[In January 1896, shortly after Verlaine died,] in Le Figaro, É mile Zola enlarged on the theme of Verlaine, the man apart. Far from Verlaine as he had been in his literary principles and his achievement, he spoke of him with admiring sympathy, and with vehement conviction.

Sad, delightful Verlaine has gone to the land of great eternal peace, and already a legend is growing over his grave.

He was, we are told, a solitary, disdainful of the crowd, a man who lived in the lofty dream of his work, without any kind of concession or compromise . . . This is quite untrue . . . Verlaine did not disdain society, it was society which rejected him. He became an unwilling creature apart, an involuntary 'exile' . . . Indeed, so little did he spurn honours and distinctions that, quite seriously, he wanted to stand for the Académie .. . If he refused everything, as they have said, that was because nothing was offered him . . .

And who knows if misery did not diminish him? Of course the fatal negligence of his life helped to give his poetry that freedom of movement which is its original contribution to literature. But . . . I should like to imagine him happy, well off, comfortable, an Academician, having had the leisure to produce all his fruit, like the tree which a kindly destiny shelters from the onslaughts of frost and wind. Certainly he would have left a more complete and more extensive work.

The critic Charles Le Goffic disagreed with Zola: he considered that Verlaine had been genuinely indifferent to honours, and that he had chosen independence. Independent he had certainly been; he had always stood apart, and, as Le Goffic emphasized, the years had not changed him.

Until the end he lived outside the rules of prosody and behaviour. And this independent bohemianism was neither an attitude nor the accepted consequence of his errors: he could (and some have tried to make him do so) make honourable amends, conform to the outward conventions of bourgeois life. He preferred to die his old vagabond self, indifferent to status and to official celebrity: he was honestly uninterested. At the height of his glory he remained a good soul, he broke with none of those he had known in his days of ill-fortune, and he refused to discriminate. He is a singularly déclassé figure . . . But this déclassé had a humble heart; this unnatural Catholic made the sweetest gesture of submissive and repentant piety before the Blessed Virgin; this poet found in the delights of a fallen angel some lines of mortal beauty. His art was great enough, and controlled enough, to efface itself, and to break the bounds of a confining prosody until it became a light and volatile music, a tremor and a cry. There it was that he set himself apart from other poets, and there it is that he remains inimitable and the most wonderful example of the helotism of genius to present to lettered youth in every age.

Some critics insisted that Verlaine had been a perpetual child; others acclaimed him as 'the dear father of us all, a good old grandfather .. . In him,' wrote one, 'we proudly honour the great French Christian poet'. Verlaine remained controversial; but now, by common consent, he had entered into glory. It was decided to erect a memorial in the Jardin du Luxembourg; Mallarmé and Rodin presided over the memorial committee. In 1897, the year after Verlaine's death, Mallarmé declared: 'We know that he is smiling in immortality, and that he is now beside La Fontaine and Lamartine'. Verlaine must indeed have been smiling. At the Académie française, José-Maria de Heredia, the Parnassian poet, was singing his praises. In Brussels, É mile Verhaeren proclaimed the greatness of 'the wandering Lélian, whose thumping and imperious stick seems like a symbol on the paths of literature'.

Verhaeren was among Verlaine's most understanding admirers. That April [1896], in La Revue blanche, there appeared the generous appreciation which was to be reprinted in his Impressions:

After the death of Victor Hugo, it was the death of Verlaine which afflicted French literature most deeply . . . Whatever the worth of Banville and Leconte de Lisle, they seem to be tributaries; they do not shine enough with a personal fire . . .

Paul Verlaine proves himself to be quite different. If the Poèmes saturniens are still impregnated with Parnassian traditions, if the Fêtes galantes seem to drive from 'La Fête chez Thérèse', which Victor Hugo arranged in his Contemplations, the Romances sans paroles and, above all, Sagesse, affirm their independence in French literature. These works are no longer subjects, they are sovereigns. They live with a new and special art . . .

Verlaine never knew calm . . . His being is always shaken by anguish or pacified by prayer; he is always burning with vices, or with virtues .. . He is a man as profoundly as he is a Christian. And it is his double nature that, as a great poet, he has sung, expressed and immortalized . . .

He spiritualized the language; he was tempted by shades of meaning, and by the fragility of phrases. He composed some which were exquisite, fluid, tenuous.

They seem scarcely a tremor in the air; the sound of a flute in the shadows in the moonlight; the vanishing of a silk dress in the wind; the trembling of glass and crystal on a dresser. Sometimes all that they contain is the docile gesture of two hands coming together . . .

It will be the original glory of Paul Verlaine to have conceived, lived and created a work of art which, alone, reflects and enlarges the rebirth of faith—that rebirth which we have seen in recent years . . .

There are moralists who reproach Verlaine for his dissipated and sinful life. One really wonders if it should be deplored, as soon as one recalls the cries of repentance, of gentleness, humility and sacrifice with which he redeemed it.

Other critics were less admiring and less charitable. A psychiatrist, discussing decadent poetry, considered that 'Verlaine was a disturbed man of genius, a progenerate rather than a degenerate, but he had strange deviations and strange weaknesses . . . One is too well aware of the sick man behind the poet.' Several critics confused their moral and aesthetic judgements. In his study What is Art?, [Leo] Tolstoy wrote, in puritan mood:

I cannot refrain from dwelling on the extraordinary glory of these two men, Baudelaire and Verlaine, who are recognized today, throughout Europe, as the greatest geniuses of modern poetry. How can the French . . . attribute such vast importance, and accord such enormous glory, to these two poets, who are so imperfect in manner and so vulgar and so low in matter? . . . The only explanation which I can see is this: that the art of the society in which they produce their works is not something serious and important, but a mere amusement . . .

Baudelaire and Verlaine have invented new forms, they have, moreover, spiced them with pornographic details which nobody before them had deigned to use. And that was all that was needed to make them acknowledged as great writers by the critics and the upper classes.

Despite Tolstoy's moral strictures and left-wing criticism, it was clear that Verlaine now enjoyed a European reputation. In 1899, Georges Rodenbach, the Belgian Symbolist poet, declared that Verlaine's conversion had been 'a struggle between Jesus and a childlike Pascal. And in this sublime crisis were born the eternal poems of Sagesse, the most moving confession of the soul in all modern literature'. Rodenbach maintained his belief in Verlaine's immortality. His faith was shared by the publisher who, in 1899-1900, brought out the five volumes of Verlaine's Oeuvres complètes (followed, in 1903, by his Oeuvres posthumes). Achille Segard, who had known Verlaine, declared that he had 'established a new form of sensibility, and in it . . . a whole generation rediscovered, enlarged and clarified, the very image of its common soul'. Ernest Raynaud, the historian of Symbolism, wrote that he understood 'all the phenomena of modern neurasthenia .. . No one translated, better than Verlaine, the atrophy which comes from excessive activity, excessive nervous tension, the abuse of life and its stimulants. In his poetry, the apotheosis of transient sensation, Verlaine contrived to catch the indiscernible.'

As the twentieth century began, the familiar trend in Verlaine criticism continued. While men of letters recognized his individual gifts and his influence, the more conventional critics continued to take a moral stand and to show a violent personal resistance to his work. Now that it was no longer possible to ignore Verlaine, people denied his genius with fury. One remains astonished by the tone of the discussion, the degree of anger and invective which sober writers allowed themselves to show. In 1901, René Doumic reviewed his Oeuvres complètes in the Revue des deux mondes.

We have been invited to do something which few of us had done: to read Verlaine in his entirety. This reading . . . makes us appreciate the equal banality of the man and of his work. And so it could not be recommended too warmly to literary novices who would take their elders' word and be tempted to believe in Verlaine's genius. This reading will prevent them from being, in their turn, the victims of a kind of gigantic joke and the dupes of an insolent mystification . . .

Far from being a beginning, the art of Verlaine is the last convulsion of a dying poetry. This poetry is merely Romanticism which has lost its vigour .. . One had only to see Verlaine ambling round the streets to think of the old Romantics in the days of the Bousingots, who were proud to go around the town in clothes which made them noticed, and believed that eccentric dress possessed some secret virtue. The careful disorder and the contrived irregularity of this costume is simply another form of dandyism. Verlaine knew it and he was prepared to admit it. He was not unaware that decent dress would make him lose much of his personality . . .

Verlaine is the frantic representative of intimate poetry thus conceived in conformity with the credo of Romanticism. One could not mention any work in which the self has so far been displayed with such boastful cynicism.

It is to be feared that one day Verlaine will be completely forgotten. He has collected his admirers, some of them men of good faith. His poetry has found an echo in certain souls which therefore saw in it something of themselves. This example will be quoted to show into what deliquescence moral ideas and artistic feelings have, at a certain date and in a certain group, very nearly dissolved, lost themselves and foundered. . . .

As a poet, he had done service to modern literature. He had restored the free use of metre, given back to poets the unfettered use of their instrument of work. He had deliberately broken every rule of prosody. He had used his marvellous technical powers, as well as his instincts, to record suggestion. No one else catches, like Verlaine, the infinitely fragile state between dreaming and waking, between imagination and reality. He expresses a thought before it is formulated, an instinct before it is recognized, an emotion which has yet to be acknowledged. As Fernand Gregh observed: 'In many short poems, which are like the tremors of a soul, caught as they pass, it is hardly Verlaine who is talking any more, it is the human soul, impersonal, intemporal, it is almost the soul of things gaining awareness of itself in the soul of a man.' No French poet has recorded certain moods with the exquisite touch of Verlaine. Simple in word and form, he seems to write almost without effort. In their own inherent melody, in their emotive power, his lyrics come as close as any poems have ever come to music.

As a poet of love, he is uneven. As a religious poet, he has perhaps been over-estimated. But 'l'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument sois-même'. So he had explained. No poet had been more himself than Verlaine. He recorded all his life, all his raptures and regrets, all his bitterness, licentiousness and melancholy, all his humour, violence, weakness and simplicity. Verlaine's was at times a subtle simplicity. It was that of a child. It was also that of a consummate poet.