“For Our Generation Walks as in Hades, Without the Divine” German idealist poets and thinkers working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were primarily concerned with the descent of the French revolution into Bonapartism, noting Germany’s failure to

Today, as we celebrate the 250th birthday of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), we consider him among the greatest of German lyric poets. During his lifetime, however, Hölderlin gained little recognition—he was a colleague of Hegel and Schelling—and he was almost totally

When Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was elected President in 1860, seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. The American Civil War lasted for

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) has been called “America’s poet,” and he is considered the father—not the inventor—of free verse. One of the most influential bards, he produced literature of timelessness that appealed to the American idea of democracy and equality. Believing

While sitting in his prison cell in Mons city jail, Verlaine drew sketches and composed what many literary critics consider to be his finest poetry. Incarcerated for shooting his fellow poet and lover Arthur Rimbaud, his time in jail isolated

The twenty-one poems published in La Bonne Chanson by Paul Verlaine are addressed to sixteen-year-old Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. She came from a respectably bourgeois background, and the family had somehow amassed a fortune. They owned a small hotel and

When Paul Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes was published in 1869, Théodore de Banville penned the following critique in Le National of 19 April. “There are art-crazed minds, enamored of poetry more than of nature, who want Amintes and Cydalises deftly coiffed

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) has been called “one of the most purely lyrical of French poets…an initiator of the modern word-music that marks a transition between the Romantic poets and the Symbolists.” His best poetry declared that the French language could