Paul Verlaine

Born in Metz in 1844 to a petit-bourgeois family, Verlaine published his debut collection Poèmes saturniens at twenty-two through Alphonse Lemerre. His tempestuous affair with Arthur Rimbaud - ten years younger, not yet eighteen, while Verlaine had a wife and infant son - became scandal when the couple wandered England and Belgium until 1873, the year Verlaine wounded Rimbaud with a revolver and drew two years in prison for battery and sodomy. In his cell he returned to Catholicism and wrote Sagesse, Jadis et naguère, and Parallèlement. As his reputation rose, guilt and paranoia pulled him into depression, alcohol, and disease. He died in Paris from acute pneumonia on 8 January 1896, two years after peers named him Prince of Poets - revered for lyrical subtlety, for making French bend and shimmer, and for coining the term poètes maudits, the accursed poets, a label that fit him perfectly.