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Pierre Louÿs
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Pierre Louÿs
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Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
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4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
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Pseudonym of:
Pierre Louis
Born:
December 10, 1870, Ghent, Belgium
Died:
June 4, 1925, Paris, France (aged 54)
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Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs

Pierre Louÿs

French author
Also known as: Pierre Louis
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History

Pierre Louÿs (born December 10, 1870, Ghent, Belgium—died June 4, 1925, Paris, France) was a French novelist and poet whose merit and limitation were to express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection.

Louÿs frequented Parnassian and Symbolist circles and was a friend of the composer Claude Debussy. He founded short-lived literary reviews, notably La Conque (1891). His Chansons de Bilitis (1894), prose poems about Sapphic love, purporting to be translations from the Greek, deceived even experts. Aphrodite (1896), a novel depicting courtesan life in ancient Alexandria, made him famous. His best novel is La Femme et le pantin (1898; Woman and Puppet), which is set in Spain. Louÿs’s popularity, which rested more on his eroticism than on purely aesthetic grounds, has faded.

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