Sully-Prudhomme, RENÉ FRANÇOIS ARMAND

Sully-Prudhomme, RENÉ FRANÇOIS ARMAND, a great French poet, was born at Paris, 16th March 1839, and after the early death of his father was brought up by his uncle, a notary, for his own profession. He studied the sciences, law, and philosophy, but soon devoted himself entirely to letters, and in 1865 published his first volume of poems, Stances et Poèmes, which had the good fortune to gain and to deserve the praises of the veteran critic Sainte-Beuve. One poem, the 'Vase brisé,' at once became widely popular. Later volumes, Les Épreuves, Croquis Italiens, Les Solitudes, Impressions de la Guerre, Les Destins, Les Vaines Tendresses, La France, La Révolte des Fleurs, extended his fame as a poet of great delicacy of feeling, as well as subtlety and depth of thought. His finest poems are steeped in a serene but penetrating melancholy, and almost all reveal sincerity of inspiration, nobility of aims, and an austere beauty of form that sometimes attains perfection. But he has ever been a thinker wrapped up in a poet's robe, and the things nearest his heart have been the graver questions of life and death, of good and evil. Masterpieces of analytic subtlety are his great didactic poems La Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (1888), but the question remains debatable whether these themes really admit of poetic treatment. Other works are an accurate but somewhat harsh metrical translation of the first book of Lucretius (new ed. 1886); L'Expression dans les Beaux Arts, a contribution to the history of art; and Réflexions sur l'Art des Vers (1892). His Œuvres Complètes appeared in five volumes, 1882-88. He was elected to the Academy in 1881. See Caro, Poètes et Romanciers; and Jules Lemaitre, Les Contemporains (series i. and iv.).