José María de Heredia
Encyclopedia
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Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
n-born French poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
. He was the fifteenth member elected for seat 4 of the Académie française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
during 1894.
Early years
Heredia was born at Fortuna Cafeyere, near Santiago de CubaSantiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city of Cuba and capital city of Santiago de Cuba Province in the south-eastern area of the island, some south-east of the Cuban capital of Havana....
of Spanish Criollo and French ancestry. At the age of eight he went from the West Indies to France, returning then to Havana at age seventeen, and finally making France his home not long afterwards. He received his classical education
Classical Christian education
Classical Christian education is an approach to learning which emphasizes biblical teachings and incorporates a teaching model known as the Trivium, consisting of three parts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. According to Douglas Wilson, this method of instruction was developed by early Christians as...
with the priests of Saint Vincent at Senlis, and after his visit to Havana he studied at the Ecole des Chartes at Paris. During the later 1860s, with François Edouard Joachim Coppée, René François Armand Sully-Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
and others less distinguished, he was one of the poets who associated with Charles Leconte de Lisle, and were given the name of "Parnassiens".
Career
To this new school, form - the technical part of their art - was of supreme importance, and, as a reaction against the influence of Alfred de MussetAlfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle from 1836.-Biography:Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris...
, they repressed in their work the expression of personal feeling and emotion. "True poetry," said M. de Heredia in his discourse on entering the Academy - "dwells in nature and in humanity, which are eternal, and not in the heart of the creature of a day, however great." De Heredia wrote very little, and published even less, but his sonnets were circulated in manuscript form, and gave him a reputation before they were published during 1893, together with a few longer poems, as a volume, with the title Les Trophées. In the original work, he called to his great friend, Ernest Jean-Marie Millard de Bois Durand
Ernest Jean-Marie Millard de Bois Durand
MILLARD Painter, watercolorist and illustrator born in Paris on July 29, 1872.Professor of drawing and artistic anatomy at the Ecole Boulle...
, watercolor painter, Montmartre, to illustrate his book of original watercolors.
He was granted French nationality during 1893 and was elected subsequently to the Académie française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
on 22 February 1894, in the place of Charles de Mazade
Charles de Mazade
Louis Charles Jean Robert de Mazade was a French historian, journalist, and political editor of Revue des deux mondes. He was the third member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1882.-References:...
the publicist. Few purely literary men can have entered the Academy with so few credentials. A small volume of verse - a translation, with introduction, of Diaz del Castillo's History of the Conquest of New Spain (1878–1881) - a translation of the life of the nun Alferez (1894), Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
's "Spanish Military Nun" - and one or two short pieces of occasional verse, and an introduction or so - this is but small literary output. But the sonnets are of their kind among the most skilled of modern literature. "A Légende des siècles in sonnets" M. François Coppée
François Coppée
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...
termed them. During 1901 de Heredia became librarian of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal
Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal
The Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris is one of the branches of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.-History:...
at Paris. He died at the Château de Bourdonné in Seine-et-Oise
Seine-et-Oise
Seine-et-Oise was a département of France encompassing the western, northern, and southern parts of the metropolitan area of Paris. Its préfecture was Versailles and its official number was 78. Seine-et-Oise was abolished in 1968....
on the 3 October 1905, having completed his critical edition of André Chénier
André Chénier
André Marie Chénier was a French poet, associated with the events of the French Revolution of which he was a victim. His sensual, emotive poetry marks him as one of the precursors of the Romantic movement...
's works.