André Chénier

André Marie Chénier (October 30, 1762 - July 25, 1794) was a French poet, associated with the events of the French Revolution.

Works

Incomplete as was his career — he was not quite thirty-two — his life was cut short in a crescendo of all its nobler elements. Exquisite as was already his susceptibility to beauty and his mastership of the rarest poetic material, we cannot doubt that Chénier was preparing for still higher flights of lyric passion and poetic intensity. Nothing that he had yet done could be said to compare in promise of assured greatness with the iambes, the Odes and the Jeune Captive. At the moment he left practically nothing to tell the world of his transcendent genius, and his reputation has had to be retrieved from oblivion page by page, and almost poem by poem. During his lifetime only his Jeu de paume (1791) and Hymne sur les Suisses (1792) had been given to the world. The Jeune Captive appeared in the Decade philosophique, Jan. 9, 1795; La Jeune Tarentine in the Mercure of March 22, 1801. Chateaubriand quoted three or four passages in his Genie du christianisme. Fayette and Lefeuvre-Deumier also gave a few fragments; but it was not until 1819 that a first imperfect attempt was made by Henri de Latouche to collect the poems in a substantive volume. Since the appearance of the editio princeps of Chénier's poems in La Touche's volume, many additional poems and fragments have been discovered, and an edition of the complete works of the poet, collated with the manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale by Mme Elisa de Chénier in 1892, has been edited by Paul Dimoff and published by Delagrave.

Related Topics:
March 22 - 1801 - Chateaubriand - Henri de Latouche

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During the same period the critical estimates of the poet have fluctuated in a truly extraordinary manner. Sainte-Beuve in his Tableau of 1828 sang the praises of Chénier as an heroic forerunner of the Romantic movement and a precursor of Victor Hugo. Chénier, he said, had "inspired and determined" Romanticism. This suggestion of modernity in Chénier was echoed by a chorus of critics who worked the idea to death; in the meantime, the standard edition of Chénier's works was being prepared by M. Becq de Fouquiéres and was issued in 1862, but rearranged and greatly improved by the editor in 1872. The same patient investigator gave his New Documents on André Chénier to the world in 1875.

Related Topics:
Sainte-Beuve - Victor Hugo - Romanticism

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In the second volume of La Vie littéraire Anatole France contests the theory of Sainte-Beuve. Far from being an initiator, he maintains that Chénier's poetry is the last expression of an expiring form of art. His matter and his form belong of right to the classic spirit of the 18th century. He is a contemporary, not of Hugo and Leconte de Lisle, but of Suard and Morellet. Émile Faguet sums up on the side of M. France in his volume on the 18th century (1890). Chénier's real disciples, according to the latest view, are Leconte de Lisle and M. de Heredia, mosaistes who have at heart the cult of antique and pagan beauty, of "pure art" and of "objective poetry." Heredia himself reverted to the judgment of Sainte-Beuve to the effect that Chénier was the first to make modern verses, and he adds, "I do not know in the French language a more exquisite fragment than the three hundred verses of the Bucoliques." Chénier's influence has been specially remarkable in Russia, where Pushkin imitated him, Kogloff translated La Jeune Captive, La jeune Tarentine and other famous pieces, while the critic Vesselovsky pronounces "il a rétablé le lyrisme pur dans la poésie française" ("he re-established pure lyricism in French poetry").

Related Topics:
Anatole France - Leconte de Lisle - Suard - Morellet - Émile Faguet - 18th century - M. de Heredia - Russia - Pushkin

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The general French verdict on his work is in the main well summed by Morillot, when he says that, judged by the usual tests of the Romantic movement of the 1820s (love for strange literatures of the North, medievalism, novelties and experiments), Chénier would inevitably have been excluded from the cénacle of 1821, On the other hand he brought to the world ennui and melancholy which were among the early symptoms of the movement, and he experimented in French verse in a manner which would have led to his excommunication by the typical performers of the 18th century. What is universally admitted is that Chénier was a very great artist, who like Ronsard opened up sources of poetry in France which had long seemed dried up. In England it is easier to feel his attraction than that of some far greater reputations in French poetry, for, rhetorical though he nearly always is, he yet reveals something of that quality which to the Northern mind has always been of the very essence of poetry, that quality which made Sainte-Beuve say of him, that he was the first great poet "personnel et réveur" in France since La Fontaine. His diction is still very artificial, the poetic diction of Delille transformed in the direction of Hugo, but not very much. On the other hand, his descriptive power in treating of nature shows far more art than the Trianin school ever attained. His love of the woodland and his political fervour often remind us of Shelley, and his delicate perception of Hellenic beauty, and the perfume of Greek legend, give us almost a foretaste of Keats. For these reasons, among others, Chénier, whose art is destined to so many vicissitudes of criticism in his own country, seems assured among English readers of a place among the Dei Majores of French poetry.

Related Topics:
Morillot - Ronsard - La Fontaine - Delille - Hugo - Shelley

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The Chénier literature of late years has become enormous. His fate has been commemorated in numerous plays, pictures and poems, notably in the opera André Chénier by Umberto Giordano, the epilogue by Sully-Prudhomme, the Stello by Alfred de Vigny, the delicate statue by Puech in the Luxembourg, and the well-known portrait in the centre of the "Last Days of the Terror." The best editions are still those of Becq de Fouquières (Paris, 1862, 1872 and 1881), though these are now supplemented by those of L Moland (2 vols., 1889) and R Guillard (2 vols., 1899).

Related Topics:
André Chénier - Umberto Giordano - Sully-Prudhomme - Alfred de Vigny - L Moland

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