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In this literary production Baudouin has made his most notable contribution to psychoanalysis. Here in an entertaining and yet keen analytic manner he has followed the life and writings of the famous Belgian poet, Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), gleaning therefrom the basic psychologic factors determining his characteristic behavior and the content expressed in his numerous poems.
According to the author, Verhaeren was one of the simplest of writers who most conspicuously exhibited the hallucinatory spontaneity of the dream, and although he was influenced by the art of his day, he vivified what he assimilated, was not encumbered with theories, but studied art and life with the naive outlook of the genius, consequently his spontaneous symbolism lends itself in a most favorable manner to modern psychoanalytic interpretation. Baudouin's study of several of the poet's finest achievements—those universally considered as masterpieces—showed them to be fraught with symbolical meaning; and the outcome of a powerful and very precise condensation of images which guided the analyses into the intimate recesses of Verhaeren's personality, revealing the psychological characteristics and mental evolution of the poet.