SOURCE: Peyre, Henri. “Verlaine: Symbolism and Popular Poetry.” Sou'wester 6, no. 1 (winter 1978): 13-26.

In the following essay, Peyre stresses the popular origins and appeal of Verlaine's poetry.

The extraordinary prestige which, after almost a hundred years, French Symbolism continues enjoying in half a dozen countries is a puzzling phenomenon for the observer of the literary scene. For, despite a few superficial appearances and occasional (often misleading) allusions in Symbolist manifestoes to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Shelley, Poe or Emerson, no movement was so exclusively French as that which underlay the poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé himself, and later Claudel and Valéry. The doctrine of French Classicism had acquired its own self-awareness through Italian and Spanish commentaries on Aristotle and Horace. The Romantics of France had generously invoked the precedents of Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron and Walter Scott. But Tristan Corbière, the adolescent Rimbaud, the Verlaine who had, at thirty-one...