Books like Selected Poems

This poetry collection by Verlaine, who ranks with Baudelaire and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France, captured my attention with its unique craftsmanship:Music, more music, always music!Create verse which lifts and flies away,Verse of a soul that has taken offInto other stratospheres of love.I read poetry for language, to listen to the rhythm and sound, to sense the metres. This is one of those instances where I couldn't help but become a bit of a poetry nerd. At the risk of sounding too technical, I was surprised to see that the metres in most of these poems were determined by the syllables per line, and not by the number of beats or stresses. I guess this is why I love reading poetry from different continents and eras, why I fall easily for bilingual collections (like this one), so that I can compare and learn. Language in poetry generally fascinates.In comparing the French poem to its English translation, one senses the distinct organization of the French line of poetry. These poems are conservative with technique. In some instances, even when Verlaine is ambitious with parisyllabic lines, he sticks to a set amount of syllables per line (nine in this case):Imagine fine eyes behind a veil,Imagine the shimmer of high noon,Imagine, in skies cooled for autumn,Blue entanglements of lucent stars.The adherence to style and framework is alluring. For example, on the surface, the words in this stanza from "Brussels" are arranged nicely, but if one was to pay attention to the metres in the first and fourth lines (or second and third) one notices that the parallel arrangement carries the same syllabic metres, producing a different kind of sound:I drift in a languor of dreams,Becalmed in monotone airAnd hardly even sad, so muchDoes this early autumn picture fade.If you love story-telling in your poetry, you won't find them here. These poems seem more conceptual, abstract. Verlaine was said to be both delicate and callous; his poems are reflections of his contradictions. His translator, Martin Sorrell, says he's "both a good and a bad poet, but at one and the same time, in tandem." Take what you may from this.