C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894)
Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René (lė-kô
t’ dė lēl’). A French poet; born in the Isle of Bourbon (Réunion), Oct. 23, 1818; died at Louveciennes, near Paris, July 17, 1894. Settling in Paris (1846), he was at first an enthusiastic socialist and disciple of Fourier; afterward he became an impassioned admirer of the ancient religions of Greece and India, and a pantheistic conception of the universe dominated all his thoughts. In his ‘Antique Poems’ (1853), he sings in verse exquisite in form the praises of the ancient gods and heroes; in his ‘Barbarian Poems’ (1862), with a poet’s insight he seeks to interpret the mythological ideas of the Hebrews, Irish, Bretons, Scandinavians, Indians, and Polynesians. His ‘Tragic Poems’ (1882) were crowned by the French Academy. He made admirable translations of ancient Grecian poets,—Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, Anacreon, and the dramatists. (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).