VERLAINE, PAUL 9

nella Venezia del seicento: Aspetti of the slave Corydon for their master's sociali e repressione di giustizia, Rome: favorite, the shepherd Alexis. The old claim Jouvence, 1988; Elisabeth Pavan, "Police that he was merely parroting Hellenistic des moeurs, sociktk et politique A Venise A la fin du moyen iige," Revue Histori- pederastic themes, which he did, some- que, 264 ( 19811, 241-88; William times closely, sometimes freely, to court ' Ruggiem, The Boundaries of Eros, New favor with his patron Maecenas, is no York: Oxford University Press, 1985. longer believed to "explain away" his Giovanni Dall'Orto subject matter. Though all his bucolic verses have Greek characters and are often VERGE(70-13 B.c.) set in Sicily, Vergil infused Italian ele- ments and personal touches into them. Greatest Latin poet. Descended Christians, who claimed with the from an equestrian family from Mantua, Emperor Constantine at Nicaea in 325 Publius Vergilius Maro was a propagandist that Vergil's fourth and sixth Eclogues, in the employ of the Emperor Augustus' celebrating the birth of a son for Augustus, pederastic and possibly pathic minister of really was divinely inspired to foretell the culture Maecenas, to whose circle he in- troduced the bisexual lyric poet Horace. birth of Jesus, have long striven to deny that he actually praised, much less prac- Vergil created the Aeneid as a Latin epic to ticed pederasty, hence the concoction of correspond, the first half to the Odyssey, the literary convention that he only fol- the second half to the Iliad of Homer, lowed Greek models or the tale that he so tracing the descent of the Romans from wrote to please Maecenas. His description the Trojan hero Aeneas and the fusion of of the love of Corydon for Alexis furnished Trojans and Latins into a single common- wealth. The epic, which embodied the the title of AndrC Gide's defense of homo- high ideals and heroic destiny of the sexuality (1924).So if thepederastic theme Romans, became the basic text for the occupied a minor place in his writing, education of their upper-class boys. His Vergil remains one of the great homosex- poem avoided homoeroticism-except for ual figures of world literature, whose epic the heroic lovers Nisus and Euryalus. poem commemorated the historical des- Influenced by Catullus and the tiny of Rome. Hellenistic poets, Vergil studied Epicu- BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jasper Griffin, rean philosophy at Naples. As a young "Augustan Poetry and the Life of man he composed Eclogues partly taken Luxury," \ourno1 of Roman Studies, 66 from the Pastorals by Theocritus. His Geor- (1976), 87-105; idem, Lotin Poets and Roman Life, London: Duckworth, 1986; gics were in some ways inspired by He- Saara Lilja, Homosexuality in Republi- siod, but actually more by Callimachus can and Augustan Rome (Commenta- and other Alexandrians. Under the first tiones Humananun Litterarum Societa- Roman emperors the rush to imitate the tis Scientiarum Fennicae, 74 [1982]). cosmopolitanism of Alexandria and the William A. Percy Hellenistic monarchies helped make ped- erasty less unacceptable. Of weak constitution, unlike most Roman aristo- VERLAINE,PAUL crats who while teenagers married girls of (1844-1896) 12 or 13 as arranged by their respective French symbolist poet. Born in patresfamilias, Vergil was one of the few Metz, he published his first book of verse, distinguished Romans never to marry. A Pokmes saturniens, in 1866. It belonged to biography composed in late antiquity the Parnassian reaction to Romanticism, described him unambiguously as a boy- embodying the virtues of classical order lover. He sang of pederasty in the Second and clarity. A few of the poems, however, Eclogue, which treats the unrequited love revealed that he was more suited to a 9 VERLAINE, PAUL suggestive style than one with the classi- January 1886 left him penniless, and the cal rules and the 12-syllable alexandrine. last years of his life were spent half in the He also employed vers impair, with an odd hospital, half as a destitute man of letters number of syllables, together with un- on the street. He died in January 1896 at usual verse forms. His subsequent vol- the age of fifty-one. umes of verse continued this trend toward Explicit homosexuality is a mi- a distinctive style, transposing into verbal nor theme in Verlainels work, notably in music the make-believe atmosphere and two collections of verse, Les Amies and moonlit settings of the eighteenth-cen- Hombres. The first was a slender volume tury painters popularized by the brothers of six lesbian sonnets entirely in feminine Goncourt. rimes (violating the classical rule that In the fall of 1871, although he masculine and feminine rimes must alter- had been married for some eighteen nate], published by Poulet-Malassis in months, he fell under the spell of the Brussels, where erotic literature had taken personality of the 17-year-oldArthurRim- refuge to escape the repressive regime of baud. The two of them tried to live as the Second Empire. In it Verlaine veiled lovers in accordance with a new moral his own homoerotic impulses behind code, or rather amoral code, in which a scenes of lesbian love. For the modern different world was to be created through reader, the tender and playful "girl- a different kind of poetry. But the relation- friends" radiate a lascivious charm but ship between the two poets was a tortured can scarcely be called obscene. For these one and ended in a violent quarrel in Brus- sonnets the poet borrowed the vocabulary sels in July 1873 when Verlaine shot of Baudelaire, especially the "femmes Rimbaud in the wrist. Sentenced to two damnCes" of Les Fleurs du mal. Evident years' imprisonment during which he also is the influence of the Parnassian found the hoped-for reconciliation with poets with their chiseled verses on classi- his wife impossible, he returned to the cal themes, particularly in "Sappho." But Catholic faith in which he had been raised, in his candid portrayal of supple, young, still trying for years afterward to lead a passionate female bodies bathed in a deli- new life. However, caught between the cate atmosphere, Verlaine was in his day aspirations of religious faith and the temp- striking out into new territory. tations of the flesh, he yielded to the latter. Two of the poems in Hombres At one of his teaching posts, the ("Men") were written by Verlaine and College de Notre-Dame at Bethel, he Rimbaud in 1871-72 as contributions to formed a deep homosexual attachment for the Album Zutique, a kind of guest book one of his pupils, Lucien Lktinois, who kept by the physician Antoine Cros, who accompanied him when he returned to invited a group of poets to meet and recite Paris in July; the two lived near each other their facetious verses. Two more were for a time until the youth died of typhoid composed in 1887and 1889, the remainder in April 1883. The loss caused Verlaine an in 1891 when Verlaine was a patient at the emotional shock even more intense than H6pitalBroussais. The collection appeared is suggested by the poignancy of the poems only after the poet's death, published clan- in Amour composed in his memory. His destinely in Paris by Messein in late 1903 mother bought the LCtinoisl farm at Cou- or early 1904. lomnes, and here he lived for two years, Together with a set of poems on drinking at local taverns, and carrying on heterosexual themes entitled Fernrnes, questionable affairs with vagabonds and the verses form a Trilogie brotique that boys imported from Paris, so that his scan- has circulated since 1910 for the most part dalous way of life caused the local people in expensive, quite rare editions often il- to despise him. The death of his mother in lustrated by well-known artists, but has VIAU, THfiOPHILE DE 4 been excluded from official editions of other writings in the last decade of his life, the complete works. The poems reflect but the totality of his work, so imbued Verlaine's long history of homosexual with the unique phonic quality of the attachments and casual encounters, be- French language as to be untranslatable, ginning in his teens and reaching its high ranks him with the great masters of points in the love affairs with Rimbaud French poetry. and Lucien LCtinois. The rural lads of "Mille e Tre" may have been inspired by BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joanna Richardson, Verlaine, New York: Viking Press, 1971; his sexual escapades at Coulomnes, while Philip Stephan, Paul Verlaine and the "In This Cafk" hearkens back to to the two Decadence 1882-1 890, Manchester: bohemian lovers masturbating in public Manchester University Press, 1974. in symbolic defiance of one of society's Warren Johansson most stringent taboos. The pieces have their flaws: the sonnets of Les Amies are slightly cloying, and a certain repetitious- VIAU,TH~OPHILE DE ness (the bane of pornographic literature) (1590-1626) afflicts Hombres. Nevertheless, in his French poet and libertine thinker. poems Verlaine created a strange and ThCophile de Viau was the most talented compulsive beauty by embracing the poet of his generation, which belonged to whole range of sexuality with a hearty the first half of the reign of Louis Xm. His candor that is all the more exceptional militant atheism and stormy, unconven- since it belongs to a time when the morbid tional existence made him the idol of the and the effete were deliberately cultivated. youth, but his own passion was for Jacques The homoerotic poems, though sexually VallCe des Barreaux, nine years his junior, explicit and sometimes obscene in lan- strikingly handsome and intelligent, and guage, transcend pornography and achieve gifted with a poetic talent all his own. The true literary status. master and the disciple went everywhere In another poem, "Ces passions," together, and when they were separated, first published in La Cravache of February they exchanged letters that bear witness 2, 1889, and then included in Parallkle- to a genuine love. ment, is Verlaine's boldest exaltation of Allowed to return to Paris in homosexual love, whose daring contrasts March 1620 after less tha~a year of exile, all the more with the regularity of the Thtophile was associated with a scandal- versification and the faultless composi- ous publication, a particularly obscene tion. At the same time, in the third line of collection of poems entitled Le Parnasse certain stanzas the poet inserts ponderous satyrique. that appeared in November 1622 verses with long words meant to suggest and was followed by a decree of Parlement the solemnity of the rites of male bonding in July 1623 ordering his arrest. The poet which they celebrate, while heterosexual fled Paris, but a month later was in absen- union8 are dismissed as trifles, "erotic tia sentenced to death by burning at the needs," diversions of couples who dare not stake. On the frontier of Picardy ThCophile go beyond the norm. was arrested and brought in captivity to Verlaine's 1883 sonnet "Lan- Paris, where an undercover agent of the gueur," on the fall of the Roman Empire, Jesuitsnamed Louis Sageot denounced him was credited with launching the Decadent for divine lkse-majesdand sodomy-which movement. However this may be, his in those days were one and thesame crime. name remains unalterably linked with There followed two years of irnprison- fin-de-sikcle aestheticism. The musical ment under conditions of suffering and quality that characterizes his best pieces outright torture that nearly broke his largely disappeared from his poetry and spirit, but worst of all was the infidelity of