📱 eBook en inglés RHAPSODIES 1831

Borel was the sun, said Théophile Gautier, who could resist him? Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly like an exotic flower to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. And now, says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, he is quite forgotten. Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are the slag from my crucible: the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. Never did a publication create a greater scandal, Borel said, because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.