La célèbre poétesse américaine Amy Lowell (1874-1925) consacre à Henri de Régnier un long développement dans le volume publié à New York en 1915 sous le titre Six French Poets – Studies in contemporary literature. Nous y trouvons également des études sur Samain, Gourmont, Jammes et Paul Fort. Le recueil s’ouvre sur un french poet particulièrement belge : Émile Verhaeren.

Nous donnons ici le texte d’Amy Lowell sur Régnier dans son intégralité, en plusieurs livraisons.

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HENRI DE RÉGNIER

Henri de Régnier is universally considered the greatest of the Symboliste poets. And if we exclude Émile Verhaeren from the list, as having stepped beyond the school and into a newer age, and exclude Jammes and Fort, as belonging to a younger generation, there is no doubt about it. Who are the other Symbolistes, strictly speaking ? Verlaine and Mallarmé were the starters, the masters ; but who were the men who looked up to them, and followed them, and became the Symboliste School, so-called ? They are Vielé-Griffin, Stuart Merill (both, amusingly enough, Americans), Gustave Kahn, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Moréas, Saint-Pol-Roux, etc., etc. Clearly, Henri de Régnier is far above them all. But he is even more than that, he is one of the great poets of France ; no greater than his master, Mallarmé, be it granted, but as great. Only, and here comes in the strangest thing about him, he is an even greater novelist. Such a novelist as there can be only a dozen or so in any nation’s history. Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Anatole France, is he inferior to any of these ? Perhaps we are too near him to be able to tell definitely, but the general opinion of critics would seem to be that he is their equal.

Yet, so far as I know, none of his books have been translated into English. Is this because of a certain Rabelaisian gusto in some of them, and a thoroughly Gallic quality in all ? Perhaps. The educated public can read them in French ; the unaducated public, possibly, would not understand them in any language. But the « Gallicisms » are no more in number, and hardly more audacious, than those of Anatole France. Still, Anatole France is known to everybody, while Régnier’s name is only vaguely familiar. Yet this man is one of the Immortals, having been elected to the Academy in 1911, and is an acknowledged master of French prose, receiving the mantle slowly dropping form the shoulders of Anatole France !

Amy Lowell, Six French Poets – Studies in contemporary literature, [1915], New York, The Macmillan Company, 1920, p. 149-150.

[Du grabuge aux Grillons : alors que le dossier de béatification de Monsieur V. G. était en bonne voie, un reste de bicyclette ayant visiblement plusieurs décennies a été déterré à Sauveterre. C’est la panique à la paroisse Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Des nuées de sauterelles s’abattent sur la région. Que signifient ces événements ? Pour contrer la menace (sans compter le grand nombre de décès au sein de la congrégation, dû à un virus mystérieux contracté par des Jésuites chinois, très vraisemblablement convertis au satanisme), c’est désormais Son Éminence le Cardinal Angelo Becciu, Préfet de la Congregatio de causis sanctorum au Vatican, en personne, qui veillera au bon déroulement de la procédure de béatification de notre Serviteur de Dieu, plein de mansuétude : Monsieur V. G.]

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