Dubbed the "European Walt Whitman," Emile Verhaeren is a pro-European idealist, whose poetry explores his overriding notion of mankind advancing to a promised land where vital creative energies and new technology could combine to produce a more progressive human strain, a hope ignominiously swept away by the industrial brutality of the First World War. And yet, to return to the poetry of Verhaeren now is to reappraise a master poet who consistently exhibits sublime visionary gift as well as his all too contemporary human vulnerability in some of the most tender and beautiful love poems ever written.