Thomas Seccombe

“ Chénier’s real disciples, according to the latest view, are Leconte de Lisle and M. de Heredia, mosaïstes 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.” ”

“ Among the poems written or at least sketched during this period were L’Oaristys, L’Aveugle, La Jeune Malade, Bacchus, Euphrosine and La Jeune Tarentine, the last a synthesis of his purest manner, mosaic though it is of reminiscences of at least a dozen classical poets. As in glyptic so in poetic art, the Hellenism of the time was decadent and Alexandrine rather than Attic of the best period. But Chénier is always far more than an imitator. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The family, of which André was the third son, and Marie-Joseph (see below) the fourth, remained in France; and after a few years, during which André ran wild with “la tante de Carcasonne,” he distinguished himself as a verse-translator from the classics at the Collège de Navarre (the school in former days of Gerson and Bossuet) in Paris. In 1783 he obtained a cadetship in a French regiment at Strassburg. But the glamour of the military life was as soon exhausted by Chénier as it was by Coleridge. ”

“ 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 Décade philosophique, Jan. 9, 1795; La Jeune Tarentine in the Mercure of March 22, 1801. Chateaubriand quoted three or four passages in his Génie du christianisme. Fayette and Lefeuvre-Deumier also gave a few fragments ”