Songs for Her and Odes in Her Honor

The first things that come to minds and lips, when thinking about Paul Verlaineʼs poetry, are music and nuance. It is through his heightened employment simultaneously and regularly of those two attributes, of those two mesmerizing attributes of his often absinthe-like poetry, that Paul Verlaine, the poet, really shines, - brightly, not incandescently, but fluorescently, like the greenish-blue polestar on a winterʼs night. But the poetry found in Songs for Her (1891) and Odes in Her Honor (1...