JAMMES, Francis. — French poet, b. at Tournay on 2 Dec. 1868, d. at Hasparren on 10 Nov. 1938, after having lived there for nearly forty years. Son of a registrar’s clerk who had come to France from Guadeloupe, he studied in Bordeaux and, after his father’s death (1888), moved with his mother to Orthez, in Béarn, where he entered a notary’s office. In that tranquil provincial atmosphere he published his first slender essays (Six sonnets, Vers, 1891–93). In April 1895 he felt himself “invaded” by the muse that dictated the dialogue poem Un jour, published the following year by the Mercure de France through the intervention of A. Gide.
With the subsequent works La naissance du poète (Brussels 1897) and La mort du poète, this first phase of his output was collected under the title De l'Angélus de l'aube à l'Angélus du soir (1898): it was a new voice, attentive to the small daily things, full of sympathy for all the miseries and sorrows of the lives of the simple, the poor, the animals, with a kind of sweet and resigned melancholy. With its measured lines, its tone extremely prosaic yet always light and moving, his poetry soon came to be appreciated and felt as the freshest voice and the finest of the century, which was already showing signs of poetic exhaustion in both the decadent and the symbolist generations. This tone soon gained wide currency in Italy as well, among the crepuscular poets; particularly clear and sensitive is J.’s influence in the varied and successful work of Guido Gozzano.
The theme of one of those early lyrics (“J'aime dans les temps Clara d'Ellébeuse”) was developed into a novella about the melancholy vicissitudes of that dreamy and romantic girl, as her name suggests (Clara d'Ellébeuse ou l'histoire d'une ancienne jeune fille, Paris 1899); the novella was followed by two others, almost forming a trilogy of three unhappy love stories (Almaide d'Etrémont ou l'histoire d'une jeune fille passionnée, 1901, and Pomme d'Anis ou l'histoire d'une jeune fille infirme, 1904). A nostalgic vein, in which passionate romanticism and a yearning for faith are equally present, inspired two new collections of verse: Le deuil des primevères (including Elégies, La jeune fille nue, Le poète et l'oiseau, Quatorze prières, Paris 1901) and Le triomphe de la vie (containing the paganly rustic novel Jean de Noarrieu and the sensual dreams of Existences; published in 1902). Yet ever clearer was taking shape the poet’s longing for faith, for the God of the humble, “He who fashions the leaves one by one”: his conversion, as he himself confessed, took place on the feast of the Annunciation in 1906, and was announced that same year in Clairières dans le ciel and, even earlier, in L'Église habillée des feuilles.
Conversion did not mark a change in J.’s inspiration but rather a sweeter and more dreamy revival of the themes and tone already familiar to him, with a total resignation to Providence, a “carbon” faith. He did not refrain from attempting to reach a different and broader measure in the Géorgiques chrétiennes (1911, a rustic poem with a somewhat biblical rhythm), in La Vierge et les sonnets (1919; richer in literary exercises, often archaizing in manner), in the Tombeau de Jean de la Fontaine (1921; a parodic inversion of the Fables); yet the themes remained essentially provincial and modest: Le poète rustique (1920), Quatrains (1923–25), Ma France poétique (1926), Les nuits qui me chantent (1928). Only the satirical tone was occasionally resumed in Antiglyde ou Elie de Nacre (1932), directed against his former friend.