The Cursed Poets VII – Auguste Villiers de l’Isle – Adam

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, was a French Symbolist poet and writer, who was born on the 7 of November 1838 in Brieuc, Britanny and died on the 19 of August 1889 from stomach cancer.

His family was a humble one and Villiers education troubled.  He was seen very early as a genius: he composed music and poetry as a child.  In 1850 he began traveling to Paris, where he meet his idol, Charles Baudelaire, who encouraged him to read the works of Edgar Allan Poe, who, along with Baudelaire, became the biggest influence in Villiers.

Villiers met Marie Dantine who in 1881 bore her son Victor.

In 1871, with the death of her aunt, Mlle. de Kerinou, Villiers lost his economic support and was left almost bankrupt.  His fame began to grow in the 1880’s but his finances remained in the red.  He was then diagnosed with stomach cancer and after a few years, he passed away, not without marrying Marie Dantine on his deathbed, thus legitimizing his son, Victor.

He is buried in Pére Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

He became famous for his work of 1886, L’Ève future, who greatly helped to popularize the term Android (Androïde in French, although the character is named “Andréide”)

By Hidalgo Socorro

The Cursed Poets VI – Marceline Desbordes – Valmore

Marceline Desbordes – Valmore was born in Douai on June 20, 1786 and died in Paris on July 23, 1859.

During the French Revolution, her family emigrated to the Guadeloupe Islands.  She was a famous actress and singer in France, acting in places like Douai, Rouan, Paris and Brussels in plays like the Barbier de Seville of Beaumarchais in which she played Rossine.  She retired in 1823.

She published her first book of poetry Élégies et Romances, in 1819.  Her melancholy, elegiacal poems are admired for their grace and profound emotion.  Her poetry is also known for taking on dark and depressing themes, which reflects her troubled life.

She is also the only female poet included by Paul Verlaine in his famous 1884 Cursed Poets anthology.

By Hidalgo Socorro

The Cursed Poets V – Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue was a Symbolist poet born in Uruguay on the 16 of August 1860 and who died in Paris on the 20 of August 1887.

Laforgue was born in Uruguay where his father worked as a teacher and a bank employee.  In 1866 the family moved back to France, where Laforgue began his studies.  In 1876, the family moved to Paris, where Laforgue began to read the great French authors and visit the museums of Paris.

In 1880, Laforgue published his first book of poems and began to be noticed by French literary circles.  In 1881, Laforgue took many activities in his hands.  He wrote a novel, Stephane Vassiliew, and prepared a book of poems which he later abandoned, The Tears of The Earth, although some of the poems appeared later in a book called Les Complaintes.

From 1881 to 1886 he lived in Berlin where he wrote, in 1885, his masterpiece, L’Imitation de Notre Dame a la Lune.

In 1886, after returning to France, he met and and married Leah Lee, an Englishwoman.  Laforgue died the next year of tuberculosis, his wife followed him a year later.

By Hidalgo Socorro

The Cursed Poets IV – Tristan Corbiére

Tristan Corbiére was born Édouard-Joachim Corbière on the 18 of July 1845, in Coat-Congar, Ploujean, near Morlaix in Brittany.

He came from a well to do family and was sent to study to the famous Imperial Lycée of Saint-Brieuc where he studied from 1858 until 1860 and where he contracted the severe rheumatism that left him disfigured for life.

It was there, where he  gradually developed those characteristics of anarchic disdain and sarcasm which were to give much of his verse its distinctive voice, due to the difficulties in adapting to the harsh discipline of the college’s teachers.

He was little known until Paul Verlaine included him in his cursed poets, and that was enough to get his work noticed and established him as one of the masters acknowledged by the Symbolists.

Corbiére died of tuberculosis on the 1st of March 1875.  He was 29 years old.

By Hidalgo Socorro

The Cursed Poets III- Stéphane Mallarmé

Stephan Mallarmé was born in Paris on the 18 of March 1842 and died in Valvin, Vulaines-Sur-Seine, on the 9 of September 1898.

He worked most of his life as an English teacher and lived in poverty, but he was famous because of his gatherings of intellectuals at his house to discuss about various subjects, like poetry, art and philosophy.  They were known as Les Mardistes, because the meetings usually took place on a Tuesday (Mardi, in French).  Some of his visitors were: W.B. Yeats, Rainier Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine and many more.

His early work was inspired in the writings of the famous French poet, Charles Baudelaire, and his later work fusioned poetry and other arts, as well as the relationship between the poem and the way it was arranged on the page.

His poetry served as inspiration for many musical pieces of composers like Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud and Pierre Boulez, as well as the famous visual artist Man Ray, whose last film was greatly inspired in Mallarmé’s work.

His work also inspired some of the most important artistic schools of the 20th Century, like Surrealism, Dadaism and Futurism.

On 10 August 1863, he married Maria Christina Gerhard. They had a daughter, (Stéphanie Françoise) Geneviève Mallarmé.

By Hidalgo Socorro

The Cursed Poets II – Paul Verlaine

 

Paul Verlaine drinking Absinthe in 1896, shortly before his death

Paul Verlaine was born in the city of Metz on the 30 of March 1844.  He was educated in the Lycée Impérial Bonaparte and started to work in the civil service.

In 1866, Verlaine, who started writing since he was young, published his first book of poems, Poèmes saturniens (Saturnine Poems), which established him as a poet.

In 1870, he married Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, and in the same year, after the proclamation of the Third Republic, he joined the Garde Nationale (National Guard) and escaped the deadly street fighting known as the Bloody Week, or Semaine Sanglante. He then took refuge in Pas de Calais.

After his return to Paris in 1871, Verlaine started receiving letters from Arthur Rimbaud.  Their relationship flourished, and Verlaine, who had left his wife and son, went to London with Rimbaud, where their relationship flourished, only to crumble two years later in violent circumstances.  Verlain shot and slightlty wounded Rimbaud and he spent some time in jail.

Verlaine remained in England teaching and at the end of the 1880’s decided to return to France, where he spent his last years in poverty, alcoholic and addicted to drugs, drinking Absinthe in french cafés.  Then, with the support of the French people and with the discovery of his early poems, helped to rise his popularity again.

Paul Verlain died on the 8 of January 1896 at the age of 51 and was buried at the Cimitiére de Batignolles.

It was Verlaine who coined the phrase “Poetes Maudits” or Cursed Poets to refer to those poets who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or were ignored by the critics.

By Hidalgo Socorro

The Cursed Poets I – Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud in Harar - Ethiopia, 1883

Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, France, in the Ardennes on the 20 of October 1854 and died in Marseille on the 10 of November 1891, at the age of 37.

He wrote most of his works during his teens, which prompted Victor Hugo, the famous french writer, to call him “an infant Shakespeare”.

Rimbaud was the second of five children of a french army captain and his wife.  He studied in the Collegé de Charleville, where he began showing his poetic aptitudes.  As he grew up, Rimbaud became more rebellious, leading to altercations with his mother and running away from home.

In 1871, he met the poet Paul Verlaine, and the two became lovers for 4 years.  Their relationship became very stormy, and after 4 years, humiliations, misery and two years in jail, Rimbaud left Verlaine and poetry, leaving for six years of life abroad, in Java, Cyprus, Yemen and Ethiopia.

In 1891, Rimbaud returned to France for the treatment of what he thought was a very painful case of arthritis in his right knee.  Following an amputation in Marseille, the final diagnosis came out as cancer.  Rimbaud suffered a lot, and died on on the 10 of November 1891.  He was 37 years old.

His poetry influenced the Symbolist, Dadaist and Surrealist movements, not only for its various themes, but also for its inventive use of form and language.

He also inspired artists like Pablo Picasso, Dylan Thomas, Vladimir Nabokov, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith.

By Hidalgo Socorro