Verhaerens overriding notion of mankind advancing to a promised land where vital creative energies and technology could combine to produce a more progressive human strain was 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.