Zweig writes less a biography than a portrait of creative suffering: Verlaine the gifted, weak-willed ‘Poor Lelian’, the disastrous affair with Rimbaud that ended in gunshots in Brussels, the prison conversion that produced his devotional verse, and the legend and decline of his last years. It closes with Verlaine’s own Art Poétique.
An early work by the Austrian master of the biographical essay, in O. F. Theis’s translation. Download the free EPUB.