Rhapsodies 1831

"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.