Charles Van Lerberghe

Charles Van Lerberghe (born October 21, 1861, Ghent, Belgium—died October 26, 1907, Brussels) was a Belgian poet, short-story writer, and playwright whose reputation rests largely on two collections of poems—Entrevisions (1898; “Glimpses”) and La Chanson d’Ève (1904; “The Song of Eve”)—that exemplify his lyrical talent and idealistic outlook.

A fellow student of Maurice Maeterlinck and encouraged by the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe in 1886 published his first poems in the Parisian magazine La Pléiade. His next published work, the macabre prose drama Les Flaireurs (1889; “The Trackers”), owes much to Henrik Ibsen. Though it was later disowned by its author, Les Flaireurs (together with one of Maeterlinck’s early works) marks the beginning of the Symbolist “theater of anguish.”

Although his first poems had been published 12 years earlier, Van Lerberghe did not issue a collection until Entrevisions. It consists of 64 poems, some written in free verse. Influenced by Henri Bergson’s theory of duration, these poems explore themes of transience and beauty through vague, indistinct images of the natural world. During this period Van Lerberghe traveled widely in Europe, eventually settling in rural Bouillon, Belgium, to write his masterpiece, La Chanson d’Ève. The predominantly free-verse poems of that volume, influenced by Italian painting, offer up a set of allegorical tableaux in which Eve appears as a primal poet symbolizing universal values. These poems were further publicized when Gabriel Fauré, one of the premier composers of the period, used them as text for one of his masterful song cycles. (Fauré also wrote song settings for another volume of Van Lerberghe’s poems, Le Jardin clos.)

Van Lerberghe returned to drama with Pan (1906; translated in Three Fin-de-siècle Farces [1996]), an anticlerical play with political undertones. Shortly after the publication of Pan, the poet suffered a stroke, and he died a year later. Notable among his other work is his correspondence with fellow Belgian writers Fernand Séverin, Albert Mockel, and Gabrielle Max (published respectively as Lettres à Fernand Séverin [1924], Lettres à Albert Mockel [1986], and Lettres à une jeune fille [1954; “Letters to a Young Girl”]); it provides an insider’s view of Belgian literary and cultural life from 1885 to 1906. English translations of selected poems by Van Lerberghe are published in An Anthology of Belgian Symbolist Poets (1992).