Rhapsodies 1831

Borel was a lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, and flamboyant sufferer who died in Algeria due to his refusal to wear a hat. His only biographer, Dame Enid Starkie, claims he is now forgotten. Rhapsodies 1831, a book of poems he wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one, is back and has caused a scandal due to its heart and soul and lack of thought.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 96 pages
Publication date: 24 February 2022
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd

Théophile Gautier once remarked that Borel was the sun, an irresistible force that no one could resist. Indeed, who could? 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 dubious name.

And now, as his only biographer, Dame Enid Starkie, asserts, 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.

Weight: 136g
Dimension: 136 x 215 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800172203