SOURCE: "Shakespeare and Racine," in The Fortnightly Review, Vol. LVI, No. CCCXXXIII, September, 1894, pp. 440-47.

A nineteenth-century French poet, Verlaine captured the musicality of the French language perhaps more than did any other poet. By using rhyme structures and meters that had previously been rare in French poetry, he is said to have liberated French poetics from the strictures of classicism and the rhetoric of Romanticism, and helped define the Symbolist theory of poetics. In the following excerpt, Verlaine compares the accomplishment of Racine with that of Shakespeare, finding the former in some ways superior.

Some young men, who keep guard over what they are pleased to term my reputation, have, in all good faith, rashly asserted that, in the familiar chat of a café, I said, in opposition to my master and friend Auguste Vacquerie, that Racine was to be preferred to Shakespeare.

Every one is free...