LECONTE DE LISLE, Ic-keNt' de CHARLES .1ARIE: (ISIS-94). The greatest French poet of the modern Parnassian School. born at Saint Paul. on the Ile de Bourbon. now Hennion. October 23. 1818. His youth in the tropics fostered his inborn love for the beauty of nature, but his restless imagination urged him to travel. Declining to follow his father's occupation as a planter, he went to France, studied law at Rennes. traveled widely, and at. thirty settled in Paris. He presently sacrificed his paternal allow ance by supporting a servile insurrection in Re union. The only milestones in his uneventful life were the honors that slowly came to him, a post in the Luxembourg Library (1873), officer's rank in the Legion of Honor, election to the Academy (1887 Ile became the centre of a school of young poets who recognized in the genial friend the master's authority. His first noteworthy voluuse. which waited several years for a publisher. was l'o4.'mes antiques ( S52), followed in 1S5-1 by Panics et poisies, and in 1S62. by felines harbors, which won an academic prize of 10.00o francs, and by 111( s t ra gigues in 1584. A posthumously published volume of th r niers po,:mes ( lti95 contains sev eral interesting critical essays on Leconte de Lisle's lyric forerunners. Ile was also the mov ing, spirit of a series of volumes. L, pa eon tem rorain (18(i(t, 18(i9, 1876). in which the poets of his school practiced the refinements of their art. Ilere some of his own most remarkable poems first appeared. Leconte de Lisle con tributed also to literature the first fairly ac curate translations in French of the Rim/ the 0 rph ic (1S69) • Hesiod (1 s69 odyssey ( 1:.+.70 i. Horace ( 1 s73), Sophocles
(1S77). and Euripides (1SS5). lie wrote also two dramas in imitation of the Greek, Les Erin nyes (18721 and pollonide, based on the Ion of Euripides. The earlier of these transla tions won Leconte de Lisle a small pension from the Empire, and from these classical studies he drew the marrow of his exquisite culture, the pagan element in which appears least attractively in an II isloire d n christianisme and a ('utt'chishl rf'publicain, both published anonymously. The poems are objective in tone and scholarly in purpose, seeking. as he said, to unite, if not to mingle, art and science. His aim through all his original verse is to show the gradual unfolding of the ideal life and the reachings of religious thought into the legendary past and the hidden future of the race. He is the most stately, brilliant, self-possessed of French poets, with perfect control of all the processes of his art; but ethically a poet of protest and disillusion ment, pessimistic, skeptical. He died at Lou veciennes. July 17, 1894.
For criticism of Leconte de Lisle, consult: Brunetiere. Norrreaux essuis site la lit it'ra I urn eon temporaine (Paris. 1895): Bourget. You ream essa is de psychologic r'ontem porni nn ) Lemaitre, Contem porn ins ( vol. ii., ed., ib., 1590) and Pellissier. liourelorat Wrairc (trans.. New York, 1S9S1. Biographi cal reminiscences are in If rue des May, 1803. and Berne Blew, June, 1S95.