Bedros Tourian (1851 1872) is generally acknowledged as the creator of the modern Western Armenian poetic language. Strongly inspired by the French Romantics, Tourian produced in the last few years before his death a corpus of forty-odd poems. They have been the touchstone and primer for generations of Armenian symbolists, decadents, and revolutionary realists.

Most of Tourian's lyrics address the agony of unrequited love, illness, and the expectancy of death. But they also include visionary flights whose intricacy of language and imagery hark back to the earliest sources of the...