Jadis et naguère Reading Order

What is the significance of Les Poètes maudits for French literary history?

Les Poètes maudits (The Accursed Poets, 1884) by Verlaine is a collection of six critical essays — on Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and 'Pauvre Lélian' (a pseudonym for Verlaine himself) — that is one of the most important documents in the history of French literary criticism. The essays established these figures as the canonical precursors of Symbolism and the Decadent movement: before Les Poètes maudits, Corbière, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé were barely known; after it, they became the defining figures of a literary tradition. The phrase poètes maudits (accursed poets) — the idea that the greatest poets are those who have been rejected, misunderstood, and cursed by their society — is now so deeply embedded in the mythology of modern literature that it is easy to forget that Verlaine invented it. The essays themselves are not models of scholarly rigor — they are impressionistic, anecdotal, and frequently inaccurate — but they have exactly the qualities that made them influential: they are readable, passionate, and they create the sense that one is in the presence of important work that the general public has unjustly neglected. Les Poètes maudits, together with Jadis et naguère, is the set of documents through which Verlaine constituted himself as the presiding elder of the Symbolist movement.