José-Maria de Heredia

José María de Heredia

José-Maria de Heredia (22 November 1842 - 3 October 1905) was a Cuban-born French poet. He has been called "the modern master of the sonnet."^{[citation needed]} He was the fifteenth member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1894.

Biography

Early years

Heredia was born at Fortuna Cafeyere, near Santiago de Cuba of Criollo and French ancestry. At the age of eight he came from the West Indies to France, returning then to Havana at seventeen, and finally making France his home not long afterwards. He received his classical education with the priests of Saint Vincent at Senlis, and after a visit to Havana he studied at the Ecole des Chartes at Paris. In the later 1860s, with François Edouard Joachim Coppée, René François Armand Sully-Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine and others less distinguished, he made one of the bands of poets who gathered round Charles Leconte de Lisle, and received the name of Parnassiens.

Career

To this new school, form - the technical side of their art - was of supreme importance, and, in reaction against the influence of Alfred de Musset, they rigorously repressed in their work the expression of personal feeling and emotion. "True poetry," said M. de Heredia in his discourse on entering the Academy - "true poetry dwells in nature and in humanity, which are eternal, and not in the heart of the creature of a day, however great." M. de Heredia's place in the movement was soon assured. He wrote very little, and published even less, but his sonnets circulated in manuscript, and gave him a reputation before they appeared in 1893, together with a few longer poems, as a volume, under the title of Les Trophées.

He took the French nationality in 1893 and was subsequently elected to the Académie française on 22 February 1894, in the place of Charles de Mazade the publicist. Few purely literary men can have entered the Academy with credentials so small in quantity. A small volume of verse - a translation, with introduction, of Diaz del Castillo's History of the Conquest of New Spain (1878-1881) - a translation of the life of the nun Alferez (1894), Thomas de Quincey's "Spanish Military Nun" - and one or two short pieces of occasional verse, and an introduction or so - this is but small literary baggage, to use the French expression. But the sonnets are of their kind among the most superb in modern literature. "A Légende des siècles in sonnets" M. François Coppée called them. Each presents a picture, striking, brilliant, drawn with unfaltering hand - the picture of some characteristic scene in man's long history. The verse is flawless, polished like a gem; and its sound has distinction and fine harmony. If one may suggest a fault, it is that each picture is sometimes too much of a picture only, and that the poetical line, like that of M. de Heredia's master, Leconte de Lisle himself, is occasionally overcrowded. M. de Heredia was nonetheless one of the most skilful craftsmen who ever practised the art of verse. In 1901 he became librarian of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal at Paris. He died at the Château de Bourdonné in Seine-et-Oise on the 3 October 1905, having completed his critical edition of André Chénier's works.

See also

• José María Heredia y Campuzano Cuban poet

References

• "José-Maria de Heredia (1842-1905)" (in French). Académie française. 2009. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=477. Retrieved 2009-01-18. 
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

This article incorporates information from the revision as of January 2009 of the equivalent article on the French Wikipedia.

External links

• Works by José-Maria de Heredia at Project Gutenberg