Tristan Corbière is widely regarded as one of the seminal poets of the second half of the nineteenth century. In his work he did not adhere to the rhetoric and artificiality of much of the writing of his day, particularly that of the Romantic and post-Romantic periods. His inspiration did not come from some devotion to ideal beauty or from art. Rather, he sought to capture his thoughts and feelings with absolute fidelity and to make his work an authentic rendering of his heart stripped bare ("mon coeur mis à nu," in the words of his predecessor Charles Baudelaire). Though he shared certain beliefs with the symbolists and the realists, Corbière did not belong to any literary school.

His entire oeuvre consists of a single volume of verse, Les Amours Jaunes (Jaundiced Loves, 1873), which attracted little notice during his lifetime. In 1884 Paul Verlaine initiated...