Rhymes and Reason : Rose Circle Publications : 9781947907232 : 1947907239 : 11 Jan 2023 : The poems of Éliphas Lévi discovered in a book once owned by Papus, and lodged in the Sorbonne Library. The book contains a Foreword by Mathieu Ravignat on the life of and influences on Lévi, and the poems are presented in English and the original French. French occultists of the belle époque often began their careers by pursuing literary endeavours, and Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1875), better known as Éliphas Lévi, was no exception. Born under Napoleon, Lévi's poetic work embraces an ennui more typical, perhaps, of the fin de siècle. Dead a decade or so before the Decadence, he was, in many ways, a man before his time. His visions of the symbolic and the decadent, whilst rooted in a Romanticism that exalted emotion, nature, and the sublime over the rational and the classical, are tempered by a socialism no doubt gleaned from a life led amid the violence of class struggle and civil unrest.