SOURCE: "Verlaine and His Critics," in Verlaine, The Athlone Press, 1973, pp. 113-21.

In the following excerpt, Chadwick traces the early critical reception of Verlaine 's poetry.

Critical opinion of Verlaine's work varied enormously throughout his career, not always in direct ratio to the quality of his poetry. A good example of this is provided by a review of Poèmes saturniens by Barbey d'Aurevilly who, in revenge perhaps for the scathing comments Les œuvres et les Hommes had received the previous year, dismissed Verlaine as "un Baudelaire puritain . . . sans le talent net de M. Baudelaire, avec des reflects de M. Hugo et d'Alfred de Musset ici et là. Tel est M. Paul Verlaine. Pas un zeste de plus". He was of course right to recognise the influence of older writers in Poèmes saturniens but he was wrong to condemn the volume as being entirely derivative. His refusal...