CHAPTER FOUR
The Poet Who Learned to See
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that...
CHAPTER THREE
The Hinge
The Beautiful Era and Its Fractures
First Movement — 1880 to 1902
The Beautiful Unease
The Rue de Rome
On regular evenings in the late 1880s and into the 1890s, a small apartment on the...
CHAPTER TWO
Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire — The Poet Who Made Darkness Beautiful
Before the Beautiful Era
Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was a medieval city undergoing violent modernisation. Its streets were narrow,...
RODIN And His Poets
CHAPTER ONE - The Man Who Made Stone Breathe
Auguste Rodin
Paris, 1840
He was born into a Paris that still smelled of coal smoke and river mud, in a city that had...
