Paul Verlaine Much of the French poetry produced during the "fin de siècle" was characterized as "decadent" for its lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Verlaine used the expression "poète maudit" ("cursed poet") in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Aloysius Bertrand, Comte de Lautréamont or Alice de Chambrier, who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or were ignored by the critics. But with the publication of Jean Moréas' "Symbolist Manifesto" in 1886, it was the term symbolism which was most often applied to the new literary environment. Along
Paul Verlaine du progrès", a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France, Emmanuel Chabrier, inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros, the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendes and others. Verlaine's first published collection, "Poèmes saturniens" (1866), though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality. Verlaine's