CLAUDEL, PAUL (1868– ), French poet, dramatist and diplomat, was born Aug. 6, 1868 at Villeneuve-sur-Fin. He was educated at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, and entered the con sular service in 1892. The early part of his diplomatic career was spent in the East as consul at Foochow, Shanghai and Tient sin. As first secretary at Peking he gained a valuable acquaintance with Chinese life and thought. In 1921 he was made French am bassador at Tokyo after a series of European appointments and three years in Rio de Janeiro.
He was appointed ambassador at Washington (1927), and at Brussels (1933) . The worldly wisdom which he had acquired in the course of his official duties did much to stimulate and colour his poetry and helped to make his style among the weightiest and richest in French literature. Though trained in the school of the Symbolists, and especially of Rimbaud, Claudel breaks away from them in certain essential particulars. His fundamental inspiration is catholicism—but the catholicism is the fruit of his own medita tion and is, as it were, re-created. The cosmic breadth of his views, his deep metaphysical interest and his fine treatment of both the grandiose and the commonplace derive from his close study of Aeschylus (whose Oresteia he has translated) of Dante and of Holy Writ. He has created his own style, a plastic versification founded on a meticulous study of the rhythm of Nord and pause. Of his purely lyrical works, the following are the principal: Cinq Grandes Odes (1910) ; Le Cantate (1914) ; Corona Benignitatis Dei (1915) ; Feuilles des Saints (1925) ; but his reputation will most surely rest on his plays; those of out standing merit are : Tete d'or ; La Ville; L'Echange; La Jeune Fille Violaine (pub. in 1901 t nder the title L'Arbre)—in which the influence of the Symbolists is clearly perceptible; L'Annonce faite a Marie (1912) and the great trilogy in which he has at tempted to reproduce the moral drama of post-revolutionary days: L'Otage (I 91 I) ; Le Pain Dur (1918) ; le Pere Humilie (1919) . Many of Claudel's chief works have been translated into English, e.g., Connaissance de l'Est (by T. Frances and W. R. Benet as "The East I Know") ; and L'Annonce faite a Marie (by L. M. Still, 1916). The Book of Christopher Columbus appeared in 193o.