SOURCE: "The Tragic Impressionism of Verlaine," in What Is Symbolism?, translated by Emmett Parker, University of Alabama Press, 1980, pp. 48-62.

Peyre is a French-born critic who has lived and taught in the United States for most of his career. One of the foremost American critics of French literature, he has written extensively on modern French literature in works that blend superb scholarship with a clear style accessible to the non-specialist reader, most notably in French Novelists of Today (rev. ed. 1967). Below, he discusses stylistic aspects of Verlaine 's verse that are frequently labeled symbolist and impressionist. Peyre's commentary was originally published as Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme? in 1974

[Verlaine] wrote too much, and many mediocre things. Those less prolific than he, like Coleridge or Baudelaire, or those who died while still writing, or who disappeared young, like Rimbaud and Keats, have in the last resort found themselves more fortunate...