Sully Prudhomme

René François Armand Prudhomme was born in Paris in 1839. His father, a shopkeeper, died when the boy was two, and the son later joined his father’s nickname, Sully, to the family surname. At the Lycée Bonaparte he showed equal aptitude for the classics and for mathematics and meant to become an engineer, until trouble with his eyes cut his studies short. Spells as a clerk at the Schneider ironworks at Le Creusot and in a notary’s office followed, before the warm reception of his early poems by a student literary society persuaded him to write.

His first book, Stances et poèmes (1865), was praised by Sainte-Beuve and contained his most anthologised lyric, Le Vase brisé, in which a vase cracked by a careless blow stands for a quietly wounded heart. Linked to the Parnassians and their cult of formal finish, he moved steadily from sentiment toward ideas, translating the first book of Lucretius into verse and attempting, in the long poems La Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (1888), a philosophical poetry for a scientific age; critics have often felt that the ambition strains the music. Thereafter he turned largely to prose, writing on aesthetics, on the art of verse, on Pascal and on free will. He was elected to the Académie française in 1881.

In 1901 the Swedish Academy made him the first recipient of its literature prize, a choice later questioned because Tolstoy had been passed over. Prudhomme devoted much of the money to founding a poetry prize administered by the Société des gens de lettres. His health, broken since the war of 1870, forced him in his last years into near seclusion at Châtenay-Malabry, where, afflicted by paralysis but still at work on his essays, he died suddenly in September 1907.