Few poets have had a more divided critical reception than Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle. To his admirers he was original, modern, and rich; to his detractors he was cold and calculated, pessimistic, and sterile. Regardless, he was a major force on the French literary scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Leconte de Lisle was the seminal figure in the Parnassian movement; he was the successor to Victor Hugo in the Académie Française; and his poems and aesthetic pronouncements had a profound effect on his readers.

Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle was born on 22 October 1818 in Saint-Paul on the island of Réunion (formerly Bourbon), off the southeast coast of Africa. His family lived on a sugar-cane plantation on the island. Leconte de Lisle's mother, Elysée de Riscourt de Lanux, was from an aristocratic French family descended from...