Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or Verlaine

I hate to admit I know all their names, but who they are as individuals somehow blends together under the amalgam "French poet." I discovered there is a book with all three of their works combined (so maybe I'm not alone in this phenomenon). The synopsis on Goodreads gives a wonderful initial orientation to their styles...

"Here, for the first time, the work of three of Frances greatest poets has been published in a single volume: the sensual and passionate glow of Charles Baudelaire, the desperate intensity and challenge of Arthur Rimbaud, and the absinthe-tinted symbolist songs of Paul Verlaine."

Joseph Bernstein, translator and interpreter of note, says, "Not to know these three poets, is to deprive oneself of a pleasure as rare as it is indispensable to any real understanding of the aims and direction of modern literature."

Their lives overlapped, not all quite so intensely and stormily as Rimbaud and Verlaine, but they all lived between 1821 - 1896. Baudelaire was oldest, and the one whose work inspired the others. Rimbaud has been credited with influencing modern literature.

"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts." Baudelaire

"The poet is a madman lost in adventure." Verlaine

"I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation." Rimbaud