Paul Verlaine, Mystic And Sinner 1844 —1896

Extract

The poetry of Paul Verlaine is a challenge to the conventional reader of religious literature. It is neither decreed nor supposed that every author of meditations or guides of the spiritual life be a saint, either in glory or, by reputation, in the flesh, but it is disconcerting if he is, publicly and, so to say, extravagantly, a sinner. It can hardly affect the reputation of verlaine to say now, fifty years after his death, that he is best remembered as a poet who sinned. Such a reputation alone might have effectively excluded him from the catalogue of religious writers. Verlaine enjoyed, however, the distinction of having published, in what appeared subsequently as little more than an interruption in his wayward career, poetic witness to a state of conversion and intimate conversation with God. He failed to win much sympathy from contemporary French Catholics, and it is difficult now to accord his religious poetry the esteem which, on its own exclusively, it deserves.