Leconte de Lisle

Leconte de Lisle
Leconte de Lisle (photograph by the Atelier Nadar)
Born	Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle (1818-10-22)22 October 1818 Saint-Paul, Bourbon Island (now Réunion), France
Died	17 July 1894(1894-07-17) (aged 75) Louveciennes, near Paris, France
Resting place	Marine cemetery of Saint-Paul, Réunion (since 1977)
Occupation	Poet, translator, librarian
Literary movement	Parnassianism
Notable works	Poèmes antiques (1852) Poèmes barbares (1862) Poèmes tragiques (1884)
Spouse	Anne Adélaïde Perray (married 1857)

Leconte de Lisle (22 October 1818 – 17 July 1894) was a French poet. His full name was Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle. He was born in Saint-Paul, on the island of Bourbon. The island is now called Réunion. It is a French island in the Indian Ocean, east of Africa.

Leconte de Lisle was the leader of a group of French poets called the Parnassians (in French, les Parnassiens). They believed that a poem should be a perfect and beautiful work of art. They wrote their poems slowly and carefully. They also believed that poets should not write about their own private feelings. For this reason, people often called Leconte de Lisle "impassive", which means "showing no emotion". However, his poems often express strong feelings. He hides these feelings in pictures of gods, animals, and lands far away.

He wrote three main books of poems: Poèmes antiques (Ancient Poems, 1852), Poèmes barbares (Barbarian Poems, 1862), and Poèmes tragiques (Tragic Poems, 1884). He also translated Homer and other poets from Ancient Greece into French prose. In 1886, he became a member of the Académie française, a famous group of French writers. He took the place that had belonged to Victor Hugo, one of the most famous French writers of the time.

Leconte de Lisle had a difficult life. He was poor for many years. In 1848, he publicly supported the end of slavery. This caused a serious break between him and his family. He supported the republic, a form of government without a king. He was not religious, and he opposed the political power of the Church.

Many younger poets learned from his work. They included Sully Prudhomme, the first person to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, José-Maria de Heredia, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé.

About his name

The name "Leconte de Lisle" looks like the name of a noble family. It is not. The poet's family were town people from the border of Normandy and Brittany, in the west of France. For many generations they were apothecaries, who prepared and sold medicines, and doctors. The family name was "Le Conte". Around 1712 one of them married the daughter of a man who owned a small piece of land called "l'Isle". Owning this land did not give the family a noble title. In old France, families often added the name of a piece of land to their own name, to tell brothers and cousins apart. In this way the words "de Lisle" came into the family. The poet himself was the first to write "Le" and "Conte" as one word. He said he did this so that his name would not look like a title of nobility.

Life

Childhood on Bourbon Island (1818–1837)

The island of Bourbon, now called Réunion, in a picture from 1809. This was nine years before the poet was born.

The poet's father was born in Dinan, in Brittany, and studied medicine. In 1813, he became an army surgeon, a doctor who performs operations, in the armies of Napoleon. After the wars ended, he sailed to Bourbon Island. In 1817, he married Élysée de Riscourt de Lanux. She was a "Creole". At that time, people in the colonies used this word for a person from a European family who had been born in the colony. Her family had lived on the island since 1720. It was related to Évariste de Parny (1753–1814), a poet from Bourbon who was famous around 1800.

The couple owned a plantation, or very large farm, in the hills above Saint-Paul. They grew sugar cane there, and enslaved people did the work. Their first child, Charles, was born on 22 October 1818. They later had two more sons and three daughters.

In a short text about his life, the poet wrote that he came to France when he was three years old. He returned to Bourbon with his family when he was about ten. During his years in France, he went to school in Nantes. After he returned to the island, he grew up between the mountains and the sea. The powerful landscape remained in his memory for the rest of his life.

He did not like school, but he loved reading. One day, the head of his school in Saint-Denis, the capital of the island, told his mother that he had not been to class for a week. The boy admitted that he had gone to the town library instead. He had spent each day there reading the novels of Walter Scott. His mother did not punish him. She bought him the novels and asked him to read them at home.

Later, he discovered Les Orientales (1829), a book of poems by Victor Hugo. The book had a strong effect on him. In a speech given fifty years later, he said that these poems had shown him the full beauty of his island for the first time.

He began to write poems when he was a teenager. His first political ideas came from his father's books. His father admired the free thinkers of the eighteenth century, who wanted people to use reason instead of simply accepting religious or political ideas.

Leconte de Lisle also fell in love with a young cousin from the Lanux family, although he only saw her from far away. Every Sunday, she came down to the church in Saint-Paul in a "manchy". This was a light chair with a cover, carried by enslaved people. She died when she was very young, and he never forgot her. Many years later, he described her in one of his most gentle poems, Le Manchy (1862):

Sous un nuage frais de claire mousseline,
Tous les dimanches au matin,
Tu venais à la ville en manchy de rotin,
Par les rampes de la colline...

(Literal English translation: "Under a fresh cloud of light muslin, every Sunday morning, you came to town in a rattan manchy, down the slopes of the hill...")

Student years in Brittany (1837–1843)

Dinan, the town in Brittany where the poet lived with his uncle

His family wanted him to become a magistrate, or judge. To do this, he had to study law in France. On 11 March 1837, he left Bourbon by ship and sailed to Nantes. The journey lasted more than three months.

Some old books say that he also travelled to India and Java when he was young. This story is not true. His letters show that the journey to France was his first long voyage.

The ship stopped at the Cape of Good Hope. There, he saw a stuffed panther, lions in cages, and wild dogs howling at the sea. These animals later appeared in his poems. The ship also stopped at Saint Helena, where he visited the grave of Napoleon. In a letter, he wrote that the emperor was only a tyrant. Because Napoleon had been more powerful than other tyrants, Leconte de Lisle thought that he was also more guilty.

In Brittany, he lived with a strict uncle in Dinan. His uncle often wrote to the family in Bourbon to complain about him. On 14 November 1838, Leconte de Lisle passed the baccalauréat, the French examination taken at the end of secondary school, in Rennes. He received a poor mark in Greek. This was surprising because he later became a translator of Homer.

He soon gave up his law studies. In 1840 and 1841, he was the main writer for a small literary magazine in Rennes called La Variété. He published poems and articles in it. His family became tired of his behaviour. At the end of 1839, they stopped sending him money for some time.

Several difficult years followed. At the end of 1842, he tried to start a newspaper called Le Scorpion. It was a satirical newspaper, which meant that it used humour to attack people and ideas. The printer refused to print it, and Leconte de Lisle lost a court case about the newspaper in January 1843.

In October 1843, he sailed back to Bourbon. He had not received a law degree, but he was now certain that he wanted to be a writer.

Back on the island (1843–1845)

The two years at home were unhappy. He worked in Saint-Denis as a business agent and hated it. In his letters he judged the planter society around him very hard, and he suffered when he saw how the masters treated their slaves. His relatives laughed at "the poet". In a famous letter of this time he wrote that he was pulling away from single persons and learning to think about humanity as a whole: "I erase myself, I make myself a synthesis." These strange words already announce the impersonal poet.

A door opened in 1845. A newspaper in Paris, La Démocratie pacifique, offered him a small salary and the printing of a book of poems. On 23 March 1845 he sailed for France on the ship Anna. He never saw his island again.

Paris and the socialists (1845–1848)

The Venus de Milo in the Louvre. In 1846 the young poet published a poem about this Greek statue.

La Démocratie pacifique was the daily newspaper of the Fourierists, the followers of the thinker Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Fourier had dreamed of a perfect society organized in large communities; such a dream of a perfect society is called a "utopia". Leconte de Lisle wrote for the newspaper and for its monthly review, La Phalange, from 1845 to 1848. He shared the great hopes of the school: justice for the poor and the end of oppression. He earned one hundred and fifty francs a month. When the newspaper had no money, the young editors met in the evening around glasses of sugared water and talked about the liberation of the world. The scholar Caroline De Mulder has shown that this socialist period was not a small accident. The ideas of justice, and the fight against the power of the Church, stayed present in his work to the end.

In Paris he also discovered Greece. Two young scholars, Louis Ménard and Thalès Bernard, became his friends and guided his reading. Through them he met the poets Charles Baudelaire and Théodore de Banville. Like many educated Europeans of that time, he came to see the art of Ancient Greece as calm, simple, and perfect. In 1846 he published verses about the Venus de Milo, the famous Greek statue of the Louvre museum, and in 1846 and 1847 he wrote his first Greek poems, such as Hypatie and Niobé. Most of them entered his first great book in 1852.

The Revolution of 1848

In February 1848 a revolution broke out in Paris. The king ran away, and France became a republic (see Revolutions of 1848). The new government prepared a law to free the slaves in the French colonies. When the planters protested, Leconte de Lisle called together the young Creoles of Paris. He carried to the town hall a public letter in which they welcomed the end of slavery as an act of justice. On 27 April 1848 the government signed the decree, and slavery was abolished in the French colonies.

His support for abolition angered his family, whose income came partly from plantations worked by enslaved people. His father, who had begun to help him again, now stopped sending him money for good. This made an already difficult situation worse. The poet also worked for the revolution itself: a Paris club sent him to Brittany to campaign for the republican candidates. The mission failed. In Dinan, after a speech against the Church, a crowd wanted to stone him, and he escaped through a window. In June 1848, when the army crushed the revolt of the Paris workers, he was arrested and spent, he said later, two days and two nights in prison.

The year 1848 changed him deeply. He kept his republican faith until his death, but he stopped believing that politics could quickly change the world. In a letter of 1849 he wrote that the works of Homer count for more in the moral history of humanity than political pamphlets. From this time he gave his life to poetry.

Poor years (1849–1857)

For almost ten years he lived in deep poverty in a small room in the rue Cassette in Paris, giving private lessons in Greek and Latin. His first book was born almost by accident. A bookshop owner, Marc Ducloux, had lost a manuscript that the poet sold him. To repair the mistake, he offered to print a book of his poems. So, at the end of November 1852, the Poèmes antiques appeared. The book sold very few copies, but several important critics noticed it: Sainte-Beuve wrote about it, and the Académie française gave it a prize. A second collection, Poèmes et poésies, followed in 1855 and won another prize. In 1857 the General Council of Réunion, the assembly of his home island, voted him a yearly pension of about 2,000 francs. (A pension is money that a person receives regularly.) He also earned money by writing a Paris letter for the newspapers of the island.

Marriage and first fame (1857–1866)

On 10 September 1857, in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Leconte de Lisle married Anne Adélaïde Perray, who was fifteen years younger than he was. The couple had no children. Family duties grew. His father had died in 1856 without leaving a fortune. At the end of 1859 his mother, and later two sisters, came to live in Paris near him. To feed everyone he began a long series of translations of the Greek poets (see below).

His own poems appeared regularly in reviews, and in 1862 he collected them in his second great book, Poésies barbares (later Poèmes barbares). In 1865 Sainte-Beuve named him as one of the four living masters that young poets imitated, with Hugo, Gautier, and Banville. Fame came, but not money. The island had stopped his pension. Partly for this reason, in July 1864, he secretly accepted a pension of 300 francs a month from the private purse of the emperor, Napoléon III, to support his household and part of his family. For an old republican of 1848, this was a dangerous secret.

The Parnassians (1866–1870)

José-Maria de Heredia, one of the closest students of Leconte de Lisle

Around 1860 a new generation of poets grew up in Paris. They shared a respect for careful work and beautiful form. The movement had several centers: Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville were also masters for the young poets, and the publisher Alphonse Lemerre and several small magazines held the group together. But the author of the Poèmes barbares became the most respected master of the group. Every Saturday evening he received the young poets in his small flat. Among them were Catulle Mendès, Sully Prudhomme, François Coppée, Léon Dierx, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and José-Maria de Heredia, one of his closest students.

In 1866 Lemerre published a collection of new verse in small weekly parts, Le Parnasse contemporain. Parnassus is the mountain of the Muses in Greek mythology; from this title the group got its name. Two more series followed, in 1869–1871 and in 1876. In his official report of 1867, Gautier wrote that Leconte de Lisle had "all the qualities of a head of school".

The man behind the legend was proud and shy at the same time. Witnesses describe his proud, upright appearance, his high bald forehead, and the monocle (a single eyeglass) that made him look colder than he was. His witty and cruel sayings about bad books traveled around Paris. The writer Edmond de Goncourt, after a dinner, noted that there was something of the actor and of the priest in his learned voice.

War, the Commune, and the pension scandal (1870–1871)

In July 1870 France went to war against Prussia and lost terribly (see Franco-Prussian War). The empire fell, and the Republic was proclaimed. Leconte de Lisle stayed in Paris during the whole siege of the city, serving in the National Guard. His letters describe hunger, cold, and falling bombs.

During these months came the worst public moment of his life. The new government published the private papers of the fallen emperor, and the secret pension appeared on the lists. The republican press attacked him. He answered in the newspaper Le Gaulois that he had never sold his pen to anyone and that hard necessity had forced him to accept the money. In the spring of 1871 came the Paris Commune, the revolt of the city of Paris, and its bloody end. He strongly opposed the Commune and was horrified by the violence of 1871. In a letter of 29 May 1871 he wrote that he was crying with despair.

In 1870 and 1871 he also wrote three short political books: a Catéchisme populaire républicain (Popular Republican Catechism), a popular history of the French Revolution, and a popular history of Christianity. In simple questions and answers, they taught the ideas of a secular republic, that is, a state independent of any church: reason, justice, and the rule of the people. In January 1872 a conservative member of the National Assembly asked the government to take the author to court. The minister answered with a few empty sentences, and nothing happened.

Librarian at the Luxembourg Palace (1872–1894)

The dome painted by Eugène Delacroix in the library where Leconte de Lisle worked

At the end of December 1871, the minister Jules Simon gave him a post at the library of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. He succeeded the poet François Coppée. The records of the Senate date the decision to appoint him to 28 December 1871. According to Flottes, he formally took up the post of assistant librarian on 1 January 1873, with a yearly pay of 2,700 francs. His pay rose step by step to 4,200 francs. For the first time in his life, at over fifty, he had a safe income. The work was light. He sat every afternoon under the famous painted dome of Eugène Delacroix. His colleagues included the young Anatole France and his fellow islander, the poet Auguste Lacaussade. In 1872 he moved to 64 Boulevard Saint-Michel. He lived there for the last twenty-two years of his life, and his Saturday evenings continued there.

The Académie française (1885–1887)

The Académie française is a society of forty writers and thinkers. Leconte de Lisle presented himself in 1873 and in 1877, and failed both times. After the failure of 1877, Victor Hugo, who had voted for him, wrote to him that the Académie was useless to men like him, and that such men were necessary to it.

Hugo died in 1885. At the national funeral, on 1 June 1885, Leconte de Lisle spoke in the name of the poets of France. He saluted, in the dead master, the sovereign poet whose songs had defended the weak and the oppressed. The next year, on 11 February 1886, he was elected to Hugo's seat.

The official reception took place on 31 March 1887. His speech in praise of Hugo was openly republican and anticlerical (against the power of the Church in public life). The answer came from the playwright Alexandre Dumas the younger, son of the author of The Three Musketeers (see Alexandre Dumas). The ceremony honored the new member, but Dumas's speech also attacked his work. He said that Leconte de Lisle had emptied poetry of love and taught the praise of death, and he read the poem Midi aloud as an example. The old poet listened without moving. Official honors still came. The empire had given him the cross of the Legion of Honour in 1870, and the Republic made him an officer of the order in 1884.

Last years and death (1888–1894)

His health declined from about 1889. Around him, poetry was changing: a new school, the symbolists, wanted music, mystery, and free verse (see Symbolism). He attacked them with hard jokes, and old friendships suffered. But even the young rebels respected him. When they asked him in 1892 to preside at one of their banquets, he sent Mallarmé in his place with kind words. From 1888 he exchanged letters with Carmen Sylva, the queen of Romania, who wrote poems herself.

Some of his last poems have a gentler tone. He returned to a Greece of light and love, and the island of his childhood appears again in them. Two months before his death he published a joyful Greek tale, L'Enlèvement d'Europèia. In the summer of 1894, while resting at a friend's house at Louveciennes, west of Paris, he caught pneumonia, a serious illness of the lungs. He died on 17 July 1894, at the age of seventy-five.

The funeral service took place at Saint-Sulpice, and he was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. At the grave, Heredia spoke for the poets and ended with the words: such was this impassive man. In two poems he had said his wish to sleep one day in the earth of his island. In September 1977 his remains were moved to Réunion and buried in the marine cemetery of Saint-Paul, beside the Indian Ocean. An empty monument, called a cenotaph, still marks his old grave in Paris.

Works

Leconte de Lisle published little and slowly. He corrected his poems for years before printing them. In 1891 he told the journalist Jules Huret that he had kept his first collection seven years in a drawer, and that he had burned four thousand verses.

Poèmes antiques (1852)

The title page of the first edition of the Poèmes antiques (1852)

The Poèmes antiques (Ancient Poems) appeared at the end of November 1852: thirty-one poems and a preface that became a manifesto, that is, a public declaration of ideas (see below, "Ideas"). Most of the poems are Greek: stories of the myths, such as Niobé and Khirôn, and small bright pictures of ancient life in the manner of the Greek poet Theocritus. One group of poems turns to ancient India. In Bhagavat and La Vision de Brahma, Leconte de Lisle was one of the first French poets to bring themes of Hinduism into French verse. The book also contains Hypatie, on the Greek woman philosopher killed by a Christian crowd. The most famous poem placed in it today, Midi (Noon), was first collected in the Poèmes et poésies of 1855:

Midi, roi des étés, épandu sur la plaine,
Tombe en nappes d'argent des hauteurs du ciel bleu.

(Literal English translation: "Noon, king of summers, spread over the plain, falls in sheets of silver from the heights of the blue sky.")

Poèmes barbares (1862)

The second great book appeared in 1862 as Poésies barbares and took its final name, Poèmes barbares (Barbarian Poems), in 1872. For Leconte de Lisle, "barbarian" meant everything outside the classical world of Greece: the Bible, the Middle Ages, the North of the Vikings, Egypt, Polynesia, and the tropical world of his island.

The book opens with Qaïn (Cain), one of his best-known poems. Qaïn, the first murderer of the Bible, rises and answers the God who cursed him. He accuses this jealous God of having made evil itself, and announces that the oppressed human race will rise again. Pierre Flottes has shown the family tree of the poem. The English poet Byron had already defended Cain, and Lamartine had already accused the injustice of heaven. Leconte de Lisle carried their protest one step further.

The poems are set in many parts of the world. Several of his best-known animal poems are in this book. In Les Éléphants, a caravan of elephants crosses the red desert. In Le Sommeil du condor, the great bird of the Andes sleeps standing in the icy night. There are poems of the North, taken from the old legends of Scandinavia (see Norse mythology). In one of them, Le Cœur de Hialmar, a dying Viking gives his heart to a raven to carry to the girl he loves. There are dark poems of the Middle Ages. The collection also includes several well-known poems about Réunion, such as Le Manchy. The book closes with Solvet seclum: one day the old, guilty earth will explode in space, and its dust will help to make new worlds.

Poèmes tragiques (1884) and last poems

The Poèmes tragiques (Tragic Poems) came out in 1884. Many poems attack the crusades and the Inquisition with new violence. The book also contains poems of memory and love written in old age, such as L'Illusion suprême and Les Roses d'Ispahan, and the sea poems L'Albatros and Sacra fames, which use memories of his ocean voyages. The philosophical close of the book is La Maya: in this poem, all life and all history are Maya, the world seen as an illusion. After his death, his friends Heredia and the viscount de Guerne collected his remaining verse in the Derniers poèmes (Last Poems, 1895), together with his unfinished tragedy Frédégonde and his main critical articles.

Plays

On 6 January 1873 the Odéon theater in Paris played Les Érinnyes (The Furies), his tragedy taken from Aeschylus, with stage music by the young Jules Massenet. One piece of this music, the "Élégie", later became one of Massenet's best-known short pieces. A second play, L'Apollonide (1888), was written to be set to music. The Belgian composer Franz Servais turned it into an opera, played in 1899, after the poet's death.

Translations

For more than twenty years, Leconte de Lisle earned part of his living by translating the classics of Greece and Rome into French prose: Theocritus (1861), the Iliad (1867), the Odyssey (1868), Hesiod (1869), Aeschylus (1872), the Latin poet Horace (1873), Sophocles (1877), and Euripides (1884). He refused the elegant, free manner of older French translators. His translations used unfamiliar names, such as "Akhilleus" for "Achille", and a very literal, word-for-word style, in order to make Greek poetry seem less French. They influenced many readers and poets, although scholars criticized their mistakes and their heavy style; Edgard Pich notes that word-for-word exactness is not the same thing as faithfulness.

Prose

Besides the three political books of 1870–1871, Leconte de Lisle left critical prose: the fighting prefaces of 1852, 1855, and 1861, a series of sharp articles on the living French poets (1864), and his speeches. Edgard Pich published a scholarly collection of these articles, prefaces, and speeches in 1971. They show that the "impassive" poet was also a fierce fighter with ideas.

Ideas

Impersonal poetry

The central idea of Leconte de Lisle is impersonal poetry: poetry in which the writer does not talk about himself. In his time, the poets of Romanticism sang about their own loves and their own tears. Leconte de Lisle thought this was wrong twice over. First, he found it immodest. In the preface of 1852 he wrote that there is a useless vanity, and a lack of respect for sacred feelings, in telling the public the pains and pleasures of one's own heart. Second, he found it small: a poet who only talks about himself teaches nothing.

His answer was the sonnet Les Montreurs (The Showmen, 1862), in which he compares the poet who sells his feelings to a chained animal shown to the crowd for money:

Tel qu'un morne animal, meurtri, plein de poussière,
La chaîne au cou, hurlant au chaud soleil d'été,
Promène qui voudra son cœur ensanglanté
Sur ton pavé cynique, ô plèbe carnassière !

(Literal English translation: "Like a sad animal, bruised, covered with dust, a chain on its neck, howling in the hot summer sun, whoever wishes may parade his bleeding heart on your cynical pavement, O flesh-eating crowd!")

Impersonal does not mean without feeling. The poet puts his feelings into other beings: into Qaïn, into a condor, into a dying Viking. Irving Brown wrote in 1924 that his verse is like a Greek statue only in its solid form: the content remains full of emotion and life.

Poetry and science

The second great idea of the 1852 preface joins poetry and knowledge. Leconte de Lisle lived in the century of history and of the new science of religions, and he believed that the poet must be a scholar. He wrote in the preface: "And now science and art are turning back toward the common origins." The task of poetry, for him, was to bring the beliefs and the arts of the early ages of humanity back to life. For this, the poet needed exact knowledge. Before writing about India or about the Vikings, he studied the translations and the collections of the scholars of his time. Caroline De Mulder has shown that science was also a weapon for him: the science that explains the origins of life stood, in his mind, against the teachings of the Church.

Religions

Leconte de Lisle did not believe in God, but few poets have written so much about gods. For him, every religion was true in its own hour, because every religion was the ideal form of the dreams and hopes of a people. The gods are born, grow old, and die with the peoples who dreamed them. One of his late poems is called Le Dernier Dieu (The Last God, 1885).

Two ancient worlds held a special place in his work. Greece was for him the world of beauty and light, where human beings were free and respected. India taught the opposite lesson: that the visible world is an illusion, and that the tired soul wants rest. Here he used nineteenth-century European ideas about Hinduism and Buddhism, which were often not exact. In his poems, Maya represents the world as an illusion, and Nirvana becomes an image of release from suffering.

His view of the Christian churches was much more hostile. He respected the person of Jesus, and his poem Le Nazaréen pities the crucified man whose message was betrayed. But he hated the Church as a power. In his poems, he often describes the Middle Ages as a time of terror, religious violence, and torture. Caroline De Mulder has shown that this dark Middle Age is a political picture. Leconte de Lisle turns the beloved Middle Ages of the romantic writers upside down. He uses the tools of the "gothic" horror story against the Church of his own century, and De Mulder calls his medieval poems a "republican gothic".

Pessimism

Leconte de Lisle is often called a pessimist, that is, a person who believes that life is bad and hope is useless. His poems say terrible things: life is a dark accident, history is a river of blood, the earth itself will die. But Irving Brown explained that a pessimist of this kind is a disappointed optimist: his pessimism grew partly from his disappointed political hopes after 1848. And the darkness is never complete. The same man loved the sun, the sea, animals, energy, and glory, and his poems about death are written in verses full of light and force.

Politics

For a long time, critics said that Leconte de Lisle left politics completely after 1848. The book of Caroline De Mulder, Leconte de Lisle, entre utopie et république (2005), has shown that this picture is false. Before 1848 his politics was a utopia, the perfect society of Fourier. After 1848 it became simpler: a secular republic without a king, independent of the Church.

He rarely wrote poems directly about the political events of his own time; À l'Italie and Le Sacre de Paris, born from the wars of 1859 and 1870, are exceptions. He usually expressed his republican ideas through poems set in the past. His Greece, where law rules and human beings are respected, is a picture of the good society. His Middle Ages is a picture of the enemy. His rebels and heretics, from Qaïn to the prophet of Le Talion, speak for the oppressed of all ages. In this sense, De Mulder concludes, his political beliefs helped to shape his whole work.

Style

The alexandrine, the classical French line of twelve syllables, was his main form. He also used other regular meters and several stanza forms, such as quatrains (stanzas of four lines) and sonnets. He valued strict meter, clear grammar, and carefully placed rhymes. Pierre Flottes notes that the importance of rhyme in his verse should not be confused with a search for "rich" rhyme: his rhymes are often the ones the ear expects, because he did not try to surprise. His students said that they learned from his slow, deep reading what a well-made verse is.

Description has an important place in his poetry. In Brown's comparison of six French poets, Leconte de Lisle used about twice as many sensory images as any of the others, and images of movement were especially frequent in his verse. His animal poems treated animals in a new way in French poetry. In them the animal is not a symbol of man, as in the old fables, but a living being with its own movements, instincts, and place in nature.

Unlike many of the places in his historical poems, Réunion came from his own memories. He left his island at twenty-six and never returned. But his memories of it shaped his use of light and color. They gave him the sea, the tropical night, and the burning noon of his most loved poems, such as Le Manchy, La Ravine Saint-Gilles, and La Fontaine aux lianes. A last detail of his style amused his contemporaries: he wrote Greek and other foreign names in a new way, closer to their original sound ("Klytaimnestra", "Kirkè", "Qaïn"), as a mark of respect for other worlds.

Leconte de Lisle and other writers

Victor Hugo was the writer who influenced him most. Les Orientales had made him a poet. His Poèmes barbares treat the same great historical matter as Hugo's La Légende des siècles. And he ended in Hugo's seat at the Académie. With Charles Baudelaire he exchanged respect: each wrote a serious article about the other. In 1892 Leconte de Lisle presided over the committee for a monument to Baudelaire.

His students continued his work in different ways. Heredia condensed the master's vast historical visions into the hundred sonnets of Les Trophées (1893). Even the founders of Symbolism passed through his school: the first book of Paul Verlaine, Poèmes saturniens (1866), praises the poets "who chisel words like cups / and make deeply moved verses very coldly". The Symbolists first learned from the Parnassians and later rejected many of their rules.

What people said about him

Judgments about Leconte de Lisle were strong on both sides. Sainte-Beuve named him in 1865 as one of the four living masters of French poetry. Victor Hugo wrote to him in 1877 that men like him were necessary to the Académie. On the other side, Alexandre Dumas the younger, in 1887, accused him of emptying poetry of love and of teaching the praise of death.

The scholars who studied him later were also divided. Edmond Estève judged that the work has faults of coldness and length, but that its best parts are among the most solid monuments of French poetry. Irving Brown wrote that, if perfection of form is the measure, France has produced no more perfect poet. At the poet's funeral, Heredia summed up the work: a powerful magician who had called up the gods, the vanished civilizations, the wild beasts and the faraway lands.

After his death

The monument to Leconte de Lisle in the Luxembourg garden in Paris (1898)

When Leconte de Lisle died in 1894, Symbolism had become the leading movement among younger poets. In the twentieth century his fame declined. Readers found his poetry too long, too learned, and too cold, and schoolbooks kept only a few pieces, such as Midi, Les Éléphants, and Le Cœur de Hialmar. Outside France he was never widely known, though the English poet Swinburne admired him. Edmond Estève noted one interesting case: the young Indian poet Toru Dutt, writing in English in Calcutta, translated him and learned from him.

Scholars continued to study his work during the twentieth century. In July 1898 a monument by the sculptor Denys Puech was placed in the Luxembourg garden, near his library. It was paid for with money collected from the public. In 1934 a plaque was placed on his last home, 64 Boulevard Saint-Michel. Edmond Estève wrote the classic French study of the man and the work (1922), and Irving Brown presented him to American readers (1924). Pierre Flottes retold his life (1954). Edgard Pich published a scholarly collection of his articles, prefaces, and speeches (1971) and later prepared a complete critical edition of the poems. Caroline De Mulder (2005) showed the political meaning that runs through the whole work. His work also helped prepare the way for some of the Symbolist poets.

The grave of Leconte de Lisle in the marine cemetery of Saint-Paul, Réunion

On his island he was never forgotten. Réunion sees him as one of the fathers of its literature, and streets, squares, and schools there carry his name. In September 1977 his remains were moved from Paris to the marine cemetery of Saint-Paul, near the places of his childhood.

Main works

• Poèmes antiques (1852; enlarged editions later).
• Poèmes et poésies (1855; later divided between the two main books).
• Poèmes barbares (first edition 1862, under the title Poésies barbares; final form 1872).
• Poèmes tragiques (1884).
• Derniers poèmes (1895, published after his death).
• Les Érinnyes, tragedy after Aeschylus (played 1873).
• L'Apollonide, a play written to be set to music (1888).
• Translations into French prose: Theocritus (1861), the Iliad (1867), the Odyssey (1868), Hesiod (1869), Aeschylus (1872), Horace (1873), Sophocles (1877), Euripides (1884).
• Political prose: Catéchisme populaire républicain (1870) and two popular histories (1871).

Sources

• Estève, Edmond (1922). Leconte de Lisle, l'homme et l'œuvre (in French). Paris: Boivin. The classic French biography and critical study.
• Brown, Irving (1924). Leconte de Lisle: A Study on the Man and His Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. A study in English, with a bibliography.
• Flottes, Pierre (1954). Leconte de Lisle (in French). Paris: Hatier-Boivin. A short life and analysis of the work, with a chronology of the poems.
• Pich, Edgard, ed. (1971). Leconte de Lisle: Articles, préfaces, discours (in French). Paris: Les Belles Lettres. A scholarly collection of his articles, prefaces, and speeches.
• De Mulder, Caroline (2005). Leconte de Lisle, entre utopie et république (in French). Amsterdam: Rodopi. A modern study of the political meaning of his poetry.

Related pages

• Réunion
• Victor Hugo
• Charles Baudelaire
• Paul Verlaine
• Sully Prudhomme
• Académie Française
• Romanticism
• Symbolism
• Homer
• Slavery

Other websites

• Leconte de Lisle, bibliothécaire du Sénat (a history dossier of the French Senate, in French)