Henri de Régnier

Régnier, Henri de (1864–1936), French writer. Once a leader of the symbolist movement, Régnier produced volumes of prose and poetry drawing upon a classical pantheon of nymphs, satyrs, and demigods. In Contes à soi‐même (Tales to oneself, 1894), his ‘Le Sixième Mariage de Barbe‐Bleue’ (‘Bluebeard's Sixth Marriage’) grafts a happy ending onto a dark legend. Régnier's novel Le Passé vivant (The Living Past, 1909) has been considered a fairy story, while collections like La Canne de jaspe (The Jasper Cane, 1897), and Histoires incertaines (Uncertain Tales, 1919) juxtapose naturalist detail with supernatural events.

— Amy Ransom

Régnier, Henri de (1864-1936). French poet who made an important contribution to the Symbolist movement with Poèmes anciens et romanesques (1890) and Tel qu'en songe (1892), in which he combined vers libre and more traditional verse forms to express his sense of the mystery of experience. His later work, with its more descriptive clarity and regular rhythms, played its part in the neoclassical revival of the period, but he never renounced the Symbolist elements which corresponded to his delicate, nostalgic, and complex sensibility. In this way he helped to win a wider audience for Symbolist poetry, a fact borne out in 1911 when he became the first representative of the Symbolist movement to be elected to the Académie Française.

— James Kearns