Verlaine was a brilliant poet who preferred to see his sensuality and mysticism, refinement and crudity, naïveté and shrewdness, as parallel elements. His poetry, like his life, was often determined by an aesthetics of opposition that united precision with dispersal.

"Crimen amoris" closes with these images of dispersal that urge toward coherence: "La forme molle au loin monte des collines / Comme un amour encore mal défini, / Et le brouillard qui s'essore des ravines / Semble un effort vers quelque but réuni" ("The vague form climbs the hills in the distance / Like a love still poorly defined, / And the fog that leaps up from ravines / Resembles an effort toward some unified destination").

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Although Verlaine's own life was at times errant, his bewilderment was matched with a keenness that focused unremittingly from beginning to end on his two great and inseparable enthusiasms, poetry and sensuality.

A theory of art and an approach to living that influenced many European and American gay male and lesbian writers at the turn of the twentieth century, aestheticism stressed the independence of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments.

Although Western culture's reliance upon binary systems of classification and identification has meant the practical erasure of bisexuality, as such, from literary and cultural analysis, bisexual experiences appear in many literary works from ancient times to the present.

Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.

In the nineteenth century gay and lesbian sexuality becomes a significant subject in French literature.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

J. K. Huysmans, an important figure in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, exemplified a style of homosexuality at a pivotal moment in the emergence of a gay identity.

Count Robert de Montesquiou was a writer during France's Belle Epoque, but he is best remembered as a dandy and an aesthete, who inspired the literary creations of others.

Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.