alternatehistory.com

"In 1911 [Ilya] Ehrenburg went through a phase of fascination with Catholic medieval mysticism and with the poetry of Francis Jammes (1868-1938). He planned to enter a Benedictine monastery but had a crisis and changed his mind. .." https://books.google.com/books?id=QYGsBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA182

Well, at least Ehrenburg survived Stalin. Had he entered a Benedictine monastery in France, he might have shared Max Jacob's fate... https://www.biography.com/people/max-jacob-21283175

BTW, Francis Jammes' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Jammes influence on poets in many nations is a too-little-known story. Amy Lowell had a long chapter on him in her Six French Poets: Studies in Contemporary Literature (1915) which sums up the some of the reasons for Jammes' appeal: "Francis Jammes is the poet of contentment, of observation, of simplicity. He is the poet of hills, and fields, and barns, not of libraries and alcoves. His poetry blows across the scented verses of the '90's like the wind from one of the snow-capped peaks of his native Pyrenees." https://archive.org/details/sixfrenchpoetss00lowegoog/page/n244 Kenneth Rexroth was to write decades later: "Who was the idol of the Georgian poets? Francis Jammes. Now that the dust of the explosions of the epoch from Apollinaire to Georges Schéhadé is dying away, it does not sound so incredible to recall that the great international influences in poetry in the early years of this century were Jammes and Verhaeren. They wrote about different things in different ways, but they were two faces of the same coin, two poles of the same literary universe — the world of H.G. Wells and Theodore Dreiser, of Gerhart Hauptmann and Romain Rolland, the world which was given international viability in the criticism of Georg Brandes, and which found poetic expression in the English language in figures again as diverse as John Masefield in Britain and Carl Sandburg in America. The Marxists are perfectly right, incidentally, in pointing out that this literature, realistic if not naturalistic, and always with at least an undercurrent of social criticism, is the last artistic expression of capitalist culture to believe in its own health. All artistic expression after these times starts by calling itself decadent. Recently, when the Nobel Prize went to modern Russia for the first time it went to a poet [Boris Pasternak] who, whatever his varying favor with the Bolsheviks might be, was for one thing the leading living disciple of Francis Jammes." http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/frenchpoetry.htm For Richard Wilbur's translation of Jammes' Prière pour aller au paradis avec les ânes see http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/jammes/PrayertoGotoHeaven.html
Top