'Borel was the sun,' said Theophile 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.
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