Before Wisdom: The Early Poems by Paul Verelaine

Description

Before he became an icon of fin de siècle French poetry and a major influence on the Symbolist and Decadent movements, before he met Arthur Rimbaud and published his best-known collection, Sagesse (Wisdom, 1880), Paul Verlaine wrote four books of poetry: Saturnine Poems (1866), Wild Parties (1869), The Good Song (1870), and Wordless Romances (1874). This volume presents selections from those books, presenting Verlaine’s lesser-known early work, in translations that Cole Swensen has dubbed “a real tour de force” and Michael Palmer calls “remarkable versions.”