VERLAINE PAUL (1844-1896)

Lot 205
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Estimation :
2000 - 3000 EUR
VERLAINE PAUL (1844-1896)
MANUSCRIPT autograph signed "Paul Verlaine", René Ghil, [1887]; 5 and 9 pages in-8 on administrative paper, mounted on tabs, bound in marbled cardboard. Beautiful study on the poet René GHIL, for the review Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui. The manuscript is in two states: the first draft, then the working manuscript of the final version, with important developments compared to the initial draft; both present numerous erasures and corrections. "René Ghil, French poet, was born on 26 7bre 1862, in Tourcoing (Nord). As for many people of Flemish origin, it is a good bet that he has Spanish blood in his veins. It's been said of him: "... a Spaniard lost in the mists of Flanders." Nor was it mistaken to call his genius and talent "a warm imagination tamed by a stern logic"... He is an instinctive artist, an exemplary case of transcendent aesthetics. "Decadent or symbolist, or both, it doesn't matter, admitting that one differs from the other, that decadent which is picturesque and historical as beggarly and unkempt, and symbolist which is amusingly pedantic [...] mean this or that, little or nothing, René Ghil represents the rising generation of workers in verse, and strongly, by example and precept".... Verlaine evokes Ghil's rural childhood, which inspired him with the passion for nature found in his "absolutely beautiful" book Legend of Souls and Bloods. Then he explains his project of a poetic work in six books, the second of which, Le Geste ingénu, will be published on March 10: "it is, as a result of distinct poems but logically linked together so that the book is one, the symbolic staging of the rising desires of youth, out of time and place, in the indefinite space of these middle ages which must lead, by evolution, to the pure Dream and to the reason sought, which will be in the 6th book"... He quotes the dedication to MALLARMÉ, of the admiring sentences of this one to Ghil, and speaks finally about the Treatise of the Word that Malla
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