Rene Francois Armand Prudhomme (1839-1907) was the son of a French shopkeeper.

He wanted to
become an engineer, but an eye disease terminated his training at a polytechnic institute. He studied
literature, and after a brief and unsuccessful interlude in industry, he took up law, though without much
conviction, and worked in a solicitor's office. Sully Prudhomme was a member of the «Conference La
Bruyère», a distinguished student society, and the favourable reception that his fellow members gave to
his juvenilia encouraged him to go on writing poetry. His first volume, Stances et Poèmes (1865)
[Stanzas and Poems], was well reviewed by Sainte-Beuve and established his reputation. Sully
Prudhomme combined a Parnassian regard for formal perfection and elegance with philosophic and
scientific interests, which are revealed, for instance, in his translation of the first book of Lucretius' De
Rerum Natura (1878-79). Some of his other poetic works are: Croquis Italiens (1866-68) [Italian
Notebook]; Solitudes (1869); Impressions de la guerre (1870) [Impressions of War]; Les Destins (1872)
[Destinies]; La Révolte des fleurs (1872) [Revolt of the Flowers ]; La France (1874); Les Vaines
Tendresses (1875) [Vain Endearments]; La Justice (1878); and Le Bonheur (1888) [Happiness]. Les
Epaves (1908) [Flotsam], published posthumously, was a collection of miscellaneous poems. A
collected edition of his writings in five volumes appeared in 1900-01. He also wrote essays and a book
on Pascal, La Vraie Religion selon Pascal (1905) [Pascal on true Religion]. Sully Prudhomme was a
member of the French Academy from 1881 until his death in 1907.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company,
Amsterdam, 1969
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book
series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document,
always state the source as shown above.
in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic
perfection and a rare combination of the qualitites of both heart and intellect.

1901 Nobel Laureate in Literature

1839-1907
Residence: France
Real Name: Rene Francois Armand

Sully Prudhomme
AKA René François Armand Prudhomme
Born: 16-Mar-1839
Birthplace: Paris, France
Died: 7-Sep-1907
Location of death: Châtenay, France
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, Cimetière du Père Lachaise, Paris, France
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Occupation: Poet
Nationality: France
Executive summary: Parnassian poet
French poet, born in Paris on the 16th of March 1839. He was educated at the Lycée Bonaparte, where
after a time he took his degree as Bachelier ès Sciences. An attack of ophthalmia then interrupted his
studies and necessitated an entire change in the course of his career. The scientific habit of mind,
however, which he had derived from these years of technical study never left him; and it is in the
combination of this scientific bent, with a soul aspiring towards what lies above and beyond science,
and a conscience perpetually in agitation, that the striking originality of Sully Prudhomme's character is
to be found.
He found employment for a time in the Schneider factory at Creuzot, but he soon abandoned an
occupation to which he was eminently unsuited. He subsequently decided to read law, and entered a
notary's office at Paris. It was during this period that he composed those early poems which were not
long in acquiring celebrity among an ever-widening circle of friends. In 1865 he published his first
volume of poems, which had for subtitle Stances et poèmes. This volume was favorably reviewed by
Sainte-Beuve, to whose notice it had been brought by Gaston Paris.
It was at this moment that the small circle of which Leconte de Lisle was the center were preparing the
Parnasse, to which Sully Prudhomme contributed several pieces. In 1866 Lemerre published a new
edition of the Stances et poèmes and a collection of sonnets entitled Les Épreuves (1866). From this
time forward Sully Prudhomme devoted his life entirely to poetry. It was in the volume of Les preuves
that the note of melancholy which was to dominate through the whole work of his life was first clearly
discernible. In 1869 he published a translation of the first book of Lucretius with a preface, and Les
Solitudes.
In 1870 a series of domestic bereavements and a serious paralytic illness resulting from the strain and
fatigue of the winter of 1870, during which he served in the Garde Mobile, shattered his health. In 1872
he published Les Écuries d'augias, Croquis Italians, Impressions de la guerre (1866-72) and Les
Destins, La Révolte des heurs in 1874, in 1875 Les Vaines tendresses, in 1878 La Justice, in 1886 Le
Prisme, and in 1888 Le Bonheur. All these poems were collected and republished under the title of
Poésies, occupying four volumes of his Oeuvres (6 vols., 1883-1904).
After the publication of Le Bonheur he practically ceased to produce verse, and devoted himself almost
entirely to philosophy. He published two volumes of prose criticism L'expression dans les beaux arts
(1884) and Réflexions sur l'art des vers (1892). Various monographs by him appeared from time to
time in the philosophical reviews, and among them a remarkable series of essays (Revue des deux
mondes, Oct. 15th, Nov. 15th, 1890) on Blaise Pascal, and a valuable study on the "Psychologie du
libre arbitre" in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1906). He was elected to the Academy on the
8th of December 1881. On the 10th of December 1901 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature,
and devoted most of the money to the foundation of a prize for poetry to be awarded by the Societé de
gens de lettres.
He was one of the earliest champions of Alfred Dreyfus. In 1902 he wrote, in collaboration with
Charles Richet, Le Problème des causes finales. During his later years he lived at Châtenay in great
isolation, a victim of perpetual ill-health, and mainly occupied with his Vraie religion selon Pascal
(1905). He had been partially paralyzed for some time when he died suddenly on the 6th of September
1907. He left a volume of unpublished verse and a prose work, Le Lien social, which was a revision of
an introduction which he had contributed to Michelet's La Bible de l'humanité.
What strikes the reader of Sully Prudhomme's poetry first and foremost is the fact that he is a thinker;
and moreover a poet who thinks, and not a thinker who turns to rhyme for recreation. The most
strikingly original portion of his work is to be found in his philosophic and scientific poetry. If he has
not the scientific genius of Pascal, he has at least the scientific habit of mind and a delight in
mathematic certainties. In attempting to interpret the universe as science reveals it to us he has created
a new form of poetry which is not lacking in a certain grandeur. One of his most beautiful poems,
"L'Idéal" (Stances et poèmes), is inspired by the thought, which is due to scientific calculations, of stars
so remote from our planet that their light has been on its way to us since thousands of centuries and will
one day be visible to the eyes of a future generation.
The second chief characteristic of Sully Prudhomme's poetry is the extreme sensibility of soul, the
profoundly melancholy note which we find in his love lyrics and his meditations. Sully Prudhbmme is
above all things introspective; he penetrates into the hidden corners of his heart; he lays bare the subtle
torments of his conscience, the shifting currents of his hopes and fears, belief and disbelief in face of
the riddle of the universe to an extent so poignant as to be sometimes almost painful. And to render the
fugitive phases and tremulous adventures of his spirit he finds incomparably delicate shades of
expression, an exquisite and sensitive diction. We are struck in reading his poems by the nobility of his
ideas, by a religious elevation like that of Pascal; for there is in his work something both of Lucretius
and of Pascal. Yet he is far from being either an Epicurean or a Jansenist; he is rather a Stoic to whom
the deceptions of life have brought pity instead of bitterness.
As an artist Sully Prudhomme is remarkable for the entire absence of oratorical effect; for the extreme
simplicity and fastidious precision of his diction. Other poets have been endowed with a more glowing
imagination; his poetry is neither exuberant in color nor rich in sonorous harmonies of rhyme. The
grace of his verse is a grace of outline and not of color, his melody one of subtle rhythm; his verse is as
if carved in ivory, his music like that of a perfect unison of stringed instruments. His imagination is
inseparable from his ideas, and this is the reason of the extraordinary perspicuity of his poetic style. He
extends poetry to two extreme limits; on the one hand to the borderland of the unreal and the
dreamlike, as in a poem such as "Le Rendezvous" (Vaines tendresses), in which he seems to express the
inexpressible in precise language; on the other hand, in his scientific poems he encroaches on the
province of prose. His poetry is plastic in the creation of forms which fittingly express his fugitive
emotions and his elevated ideas. Both by the charm of his pure and perfect phrase, by his consummate
art, and the dignity which informs all his work, Sully Prudhomme deserves rank among the foremost of
modern poets.
Father: (d. 1841)
Nobel Prize for Literature 1901