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#(for those who only subbed to me for haikyuu names explanation i promise i'm gonna go back to them soon
orion-s-things · 7 months
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Just saw someone on pinterest saying "idk is Verlaine french" and actually you know what this is the last straw. So, I'm french, I've studied both of those authors in middle and high school, and it's time to discuss what they were really like, because I see a lot of information on japanese authors going around in the bsd fandoms and the american authors generally don't need to be introduced.
So, first off, to start with the obvious, YES. Verlaine is french. So is Rimbaud. Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine are both very famous 19th century french poets. Actually, Rimbaud is arguably the most famous french poet ever, and usually the first author you ever study in poetry when you study french literature. Verlaine is, today, mostly known for his association to Rimbaud, although his poems are still read.
Starting off with the less mentally unstable of the two... Paul Verlaine. Which, if the only thing you know about those authors is bsd canon, is probably surprising to you. (But tbh, I have so many questions about WHY they were represented like that in BSD.....) Fair warning, though : the less mentally unstable of the two isn't saying much. Both of them were complete madmen.
Paul Verlaine is this guy :
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Ironically, Paul Verlaine is his birth name. He was born in 1844, started to write in 1858 at the age of 14, and died in 1895 at the age of 51. His most known book is his first one, Saturnian Poems, published in 1866, so if we ever get an ability name, it'll probably be that. Saturnian, because at the time, Saturn was considered to be the planet of melancholy, which in the 19th century didn't mean a weird sort of nostalgia, but rather an undiagnosed depression. He's the archetype of the tortured poet - a concept he majorly theorised himself -, basically, and was either appreciated by his contemporaries as a genius poet or depreciated as a mad asshole (most of which is due to his story with Rimbaud).
He got along "well" with his mother, except for the part where he tried to murder her because he was sad the girl he loved married someone else and then died. More seriously, his parents loved him, and his father passed in 1865. His relationship with his mom was both very loving and very violent - as I said, murder attempt, but he lived with her also -, and he was in love with his cousin, Elisa, an orphan who was raised with him. He wanted to marry her but she settled for a rich guy and then died giving birth in 1867. Afterwards, he got very into alcohol and violence. He then finally married Mathilde Mauté, 17, for whom he wrote a few love poems. They had a son a few years later.
He wrote a shit ton of poems, I'm not kidding. He's mainly known for Saturnian Poems, but also a bit famous for his erotic poetry - which i'm not a big fan of,,, -, mainly because he wrote both about men and women.
His literary movement was the Parnassian movement, whose main point is to make art for art, for beauty, and to detach art from any notion of usefulness.
He was, as a whole, a piece of shit. He beat his wife and his son extremely violently, sometimes almost to death. His wife divorced him after four years of marriage, in 1874.
I'll do the next part introducing Rimbaud soon, I guess, and then probably a last one to talk about their relationship.
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