The Jungle Poems of LeConte de Lisle, , LeConte De Lisle Charles Marie Rene

David R. Slavitt, award-winning author of more than 100 books of poetry and prose, translates the work of Charles Marie Ren Leconte de Lisle, a French poet associated with the Parnassian movement. To look at Leconte de Lisle now, writes Slavitt in the books introduction, is to discover a sensibility strikingly similar to that of Elizabeth Bishop (with Africa instead of Brazil as his mise en sc ne). In some ways, he reminds me, too, of Wallace Stevens, stuck up in the fog of Hartford and longing for the glare of the tropics (Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf). He was an accomplished classicist who translated Homers Iliad and the Eumenides of Aschylus. But it is as a poet that he fascinates me, and particularly as one whose technical abilities are impressive and whose subjects were often deliberately exotic and primitif.