Poetry is the memory of the world. And this memory carries all the joys, all the loves, all the vital impulses that have inhabited man since the beginning, but always with their dark side, that of suffering, doubt, solitude, and death, the inevitable end of the journey.
And because he is the only animal to know that he must die, man carries within him this irreducible nostalgia that can be the moving memory of a paradise forever lost. Thus, the most beautiful poems I have collected—from Baudelairean spleen to the tormented accents of a Verlaine—are imbued with it.
In the texts gathered here, with the subjectivity proper to this kind of selection, what is somewhat vaguely called "romanticism" mixes its painful accents with the more modulated ones of "melancholy." In the 19th century, wasn't it said of certain great poets that they "wore their hearts in a sling", such as Baudelaire writing: "A tender heart that hates the vast and black nothingness"?