
A vivid portrait of a restless, visionary mind unfolds across these poems, where raw emotion collides with daring experiments in rhythm and image. The verses capture the fevered intensity of adolescent rebellion, the flickering light of fleeting love, and the stark, sometimes brutal, observations of a world in flux. Even in their brevity, the lines pulse with a voice that refuses to be tamed, inviting listeners to feel the turbulence and wonder that defined an entire generation of French poetry.
The accompanying preface offers a thoughtful guide to the text’s complicated history, explaining how the poet’s own revisions and the careful hand of a contemporary critic shaped the final form. Scholarly notes illuminate obscure passages, flag reconstructed lines, and place each poem within a careful chronological framework, allowing the listener to trace the evolution of the writer’s style.
Together, the poems and their commentary create an immersive listening experience, balancing the immediacy of the original verses with the clarity of modern editorial insight. It’s an invitation to hear a young poet’s daring imagination in its most complete and well‑curated presentation.
Full title
Poésies complètes, avec préface de Paul Verlaine et notes de l'éditeur
Language
fr
Duration
~2 hours (118K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Laurent Vogel, Robert Connal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr)
Release date
2009-07-03
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
Subjects

1854–1891
A brilliant rebel of French poetry, he wrote his most influential work while still a teenager and changed modern literature before he was twenty. His poems and prose are vivid, daring, and strangely fresh, still able to feel young and unsettling today.
View all books
by Arthur Rimbaud

by Arthur Rimbaud

by François Villon

by Francis Picabia

by Edgar Allan Poe

by Valmiki

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow