The Pleasures of Passé Poets

What poems we read from the past century (and from previous centuries) is determined largely by a benign confederacy of critics and anthologists who identify and preserve those writers they deem worthy of attention and silently leave in obscurity those they do not. The resulting canon is generally thought to be the result of the survival of the fittest: those poets and periods that left us the best poems prevail while others lapse into deserved neglect. Our unquestioning trust in the judgment that has preserved some poets while consigning others to oblivion is rarely doubted, but perhaps some questioning would be salutary. This seems especially true when we reflect that among the forgotten poets are sometimes found writers who in their own day were highly esteemed, and we might reasonably ask ourselves, What earned them this esteem? It may be worthwhile to question from time to time the established consensus of critics and anthologists by reexamining the oeuvres of passé poets—of those who enjoyed high reputations during their lifetimes but who are now out of favor—and by determining whether some of them might not have left us poems worth remembering either for their intrinsic value or for their cultural importance. What follows here is a brief selective review of some European poets once eminent and now forgotten, to see whether there is to be found in them something worthy of preservation.

A particularly notable example of a writer esteemed in his own day but now condescendingly disregarded is the French poet Sully Prudhomme (born René-François-Armand Prudhomme, 1839-1907). Sully Prudhomme's distinguished international reputation culminated in his being awarded the first Nobel Prize in literature in 1901. A standard French textbook published a few years after his death describes him as "a poet of the deep inner life who analyzed in his verse the most nuanced sentiments of his exquisite, delicate soul . . . at his best a great poet." Today he survives, if at all, only in the sentimental stanzas of "The Broken Vase" (La Vase Brisé), which are sometimes assigned to French high-school students for study or memorization. In this poem a broken heart is compared to a broken vase: a fortuitous tap leaves a vase cracked, its water slowly leaking, its flower dying. Similarly a lover's thoughtless word touches his lover's heart, bruising it; its flower of love dies. "It is broken, don't touch it" (Il est brisé, n'y touchez pas). Little here seems like "the nuanced sentiments of [an] exquisite, delicate soul," and the concluding verse leaves us wondering in what sense one is to avoid touching a bruised heart. But elsewhere in Sully Prudhomme's oeuvre we find more telling analogies. "The Milky Way" (La Voie Lactée) is a dialogue in which the speaker addresses the constellation above, asking why its beams in the infinite dark seem to show a sad tenderness (tendresses douloureuses) suggesting tears of light, and the stars respond, "We are alone . . . each of us is very far from sister-stars whom you think are our near neighbors, and the intimate ardor of their flames burns in indifferent skies." And the poet sees a similarity to human souls that remain solitary despite physical proximity with other human beings. (A prose summary can, of course, convey only partially the effect of a poem, especially a poem with the disciplined form and dictional refinement of La Voie Lactée.)

Sully Prudhomme's stanzas develop in unique ways subjects that other poets have found comparably poignant. Heinrich Heine had earlier commented, "It may be that the stars of heaven appear fair and pure simply because they are so far away from us, and we know nothing of their private lives." And some of Philip Larkin's most moving poems reflect on our being strangers and alone in the midst of superficially companionable social gatherings.

Sully Prudhomme's second published volume of verse (all sonnets) contain some of his finest lyric poems. The first poem, Fleurs de Sang, is a forceful reminder that nature pays little heed to what men do. Later a three-hundred...