Sully Prudhomme, René-François-Armand Prudhomme, detto

SULLY PRUDHOMME, René-François-Armand Prudhomme, detto. - French poet, b. in Paris on 16 May 1839, d. at Chatenay on 7 Sept. 1907.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century he was one of the most fashionable poets in France. From scientific studies, and through various employments, he passed to an exclusively literary activity after the success of his first volume, Stances et poèmes (1865), typically Parnassian. From this kind of delicate and refined poetry, full of sensibility, of which the most typical and most famous piece is Le vase brisé, S. P. moved toward philosophical poetry, first with the translation of the first book of Lucretius (1866) and with the Épreuves and the Solitudes (1866 and 1872; the latter still Parnassian in flavor); then with various lyrics, Les destins, La France, Les usines tendresses, La justice, Le bonheur, all published between 1872 and 1888. For S. P. poetry must be intimate and philosophical, and the "external world" is interesting only insofar as it is a "sublime enigma." In his last poems, didactic and rhetorical, he ingeniously described the barometer, the multiplication table, the positivist doctrine, Stoic morality. He also published a study on Pascal and gathered in his Testament poétique (1901) some critical essays, among them a discussion with the Symbolists on the necessity of a rhythmic verse. Member of the Académie française in 1881. Nobel Prize 1901.

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