SOURCE: “Verlaine's Subversion of Language,” in The Crisis of French Symbolism, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 76–112.

In the following essay, Porter questions the “musicality” of Verlaine's poetry and discusses his use of language, which makes the reader consider reality in new ways.

Verlaine has been neglected in recent years. The brevity of his poems; their songlike, informal diction; their paucity of metaphor and allusion; and their lack of those intellectual themes that are commonly held to characterize true “Symbolism”—from the beginning, all these features have tempted critics to judge his verse agreeable but minor. His alcoholism and the poetic decline of his final fifteen years, which he spent as a sodden derelict, have reinforced the trend to slight or to dismiss his work. Until recently even critics who have looked closely at his poems have tended to obscure our sense of the evolution of Verlaine's poetry by treating...