Photograph by Otto Wegener in 1893
- "Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia."— Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis
Paul-Marie Verlaine (30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements in French literature.
Verlaine was born on 30 March 1844 at Metz, an only child of Nicolas Verlaine, a captain in the army, and Stéphanie Dehée, the daughter of a farmer from Arras.
