JAMMES, FRANCIS. – French poet, born at Tournay on 2 Dec. 1868, died at Hasparren on 10 Nov. 1938, after having lived there for almost forty years. The son of a Registry official who had come to France from Guadeloupe, he studied at Bordeaux and, after the death of his father (1888), moved with his mother to Orthez, in Béarn, where he entered a notarial office. In that tranquil provincial atmosphere he published his first modest attempts (Six sonnets, Vers, 1891–93): in April 1895 he felt himself “invaded” by the inspiration that dictated the dialogue-poem Un jour, published by the Mercure de France the following year through the good offices of A. Gide.
With the subsequent La naissance du poète (Brussels 1897) and La mort du poète, this first part of his work 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 things of everyday life, full of sympathy for all the miseries and sufferings in the lives of simple people, the poor, and animals, with a sort of gentle and resigned melancholy. With its measures, its extremely prosaic yet always light and moving tone, his poetry soon came to be appreciated and felt as the freshest voice in that end of the century which was already revealing the poetic exhaustion of the Decadent generation and of the Symbolist one. That tone soon became widely diffused in Italy as well, through the crepuscular poets: J.’s contribution is particularly clear and perceptible in the successful and highly composite work of Guido Gozzano.
The theme of one of those early lyrics (“J’aime dans les temps Clara d’Ellébeuse”) found development in a novella about the melancholy story of that young girl, as dreamy and romantic as her name (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 (Almalide d’Errémont 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 the impulse toward faith were equally present, inspired two new collections of verse: Le deuil des primevères (including the 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 Noarreau and the sensual dreams of Existences; published in 1902). Nevertheless, the poet’s longing for faith, for the God of the humble, “He who makes the leaves one by one,” emerged ever more clearly: the conversion took place, according to his own confession, on the day of the Annunciation in 1906, and was announced that same year in Clairières dans le ciel, and even earlier in the Église habillée des feuilles.
The conversion did not mark a change in J.’s inspiration, but rather a still gentler and more dreamlike resumption of the themes and tone already familiar, with total resignation to Providence, a faith “of a charcoal-burner.” He did not shrink from attempting to attain a different and broader measure in the Géorgiques chrétiennes (1911, a rustic poem with a somewhat biblical rhythm), in La Vierge et les sommets (1919; richer in literary exercises, and often in archaizing mannerisms), and in the Tombou de Jean de la Fontaine (1921; a parodic reversal of the Fables); but 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 taken up again in Antigyde ou Elie de Nacre (1932), directed against his former friend.