Charles-Marie-René
Leconte de Lisle

born
Oct. 22, 1818, Saint-Paul, Réunion
died July 17, 1894, Louveciennes, near
Paris
poet,
leader of the Parnassians, who from 1865
to 1895 was acknowledged as the foremost
French poet apart from the aging Victor
Hugo.
Leconte
de Lisle’s theories, reacting against
Romanticism and stressing the need for
impersonality and discipline in poetry,
were expressed with deliberate
provocativeness and exaggeration. His
epic poetry is often overweighted by
erudition and ornamentation, but his
shorter poems convey a compelling and
individual vision, and “Qaïn” (1869;
“Cain”) is one of the most impressive
short epics of the 19th century.
Leconte
de Lisle was sent to the Université de
Rennes in 1837 but gave up law for
literature. Recalled to Réunion by his
family, he remained unwillingly on the
island from 1843 to 1846, when he
returned to France to work on La
Démocratie pacifique, a daily journal
that propagated the utopian social
theories of Charles Fourier. In the
poems of the next few years he drew on
Greek mythology for symbols of his
Revolutionary views; he wrote political
articles and unsuccessfully attempted
practical work for the February
Revolution of 1848. Later, while
remaining a republican, he became
convinced that the poet should not
engage in direct political action.
His
first volume of poetry was published in
1852. He eventually arranged the poems,
which had appeared in different
collections during his lifetime, to form
Poèmes antiques, Poèmes barbares, and
Poèmes tragiques. Derniers poèmes was
published in 1895.
He
spent most of his life in financial
need, attempting to support his mother,
sisters, and wife by his writings. He
published a series of translations from
Greek and Latin; three anticlerical and
republican booklets (1871–72); and,
under the pseudonym Pierre Gosset,
Histoire du Moyen Âge (1876). In 1873 he
obtained a sinecure as librarian of the
Senate and in 1886 was elected to
succeed Hugo as a member of the Académie
Française.
At the
centre of Leconte de Lisle’s poetry is a
sense of the impermanence of a vast and
pitiless universe. Influenced by the new
study of comparative religion and by
contemporary scientific discoveries, his
epics show the death of religions and
civilizations—Greek, Indian, Celtic,
Scandinavian, Polynesian, Jewish, and
Christian. Some of Leconte de Lisle’s
finest poems describe scenes of cosmic
destruction with exultation rather than
terror. They assert that, in the face of
the cruel forces that create and destroy
an ephemeral world, the poet must savour
the more sharply its rich physical
beauty.