The French poet Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894), a leader of the group of poets called the Parnassians, was famed for the sonorous and brilliantly visual qualities of his poetry.

Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle was born in Saint-Paul on the Île de la Réunion, an overseas department of France, on Oct. 22, 1818. Brought to France in his infancy, he later returned at various times to Réunion before settling in Paris to work on socialist journals. After the political disillusionment of 1848, Leconte de Lisle turned from politics and devoted his life to poetry. As a young man, he had been deeply moved by the visual brilliance of Victor Hugo's poems in Les Orientales, which he claimed had revealed to him the beauty of his homeland. Another youthful influence, along with his revolutionary social enthusiasms, had developed under the influence of Louis...