Maurice de Guérin
| Maurice de Guérin | |
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| Born | Georges-Pierre-Maurice de Guérin 4 August 1810 Andillac, Tarn, France |
| Died | 19 July 1839 (aged 28) Andillac, Tarn, France |
| Occupation | poet |
Georges-Pierre-Maurice de Guérin (4 August 1810 – 19 July 1839) was a French poet. According to Sainte-Beuve, no French poet or painter rendered "the feeling for nature, the feeling for the origin of things and the sovereign principle of life" as well as Guérin.
Descended from nobility, Maurice de Guérin was born at the château of Le Cayla in Andillac, Tarn. He was educated at a religious seminary in Toulouse, and then at the Collège Stanislas de Paris, after which he entered the society at La Chesnaye in Brittany, founded by Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais. It was with continuing doubts that, under the influence of Lamennais, Guérin joined a new religious order in the autumn of 1832; and when, in September of the next year, Lamennais, who had come under the displeasure of Rome, severed his connection with the society, Maurice de Guérin followed his example. In November 1838 he married a Creole lady of some fortune; but a few months afterwards he died of consumption.
In the Revue des deux mondes for 15 May 1840, a memorial of Maurice de Guérin by George Sand was published, to which she added two fragments of his writings—one a composition in prose entitled "The Centaur", and the other a short poem. His Reliquiae (2 vols., 1861), including the "Centaur", his journal, a number of his letters and several poems, was edited by G.S. Trébutien, and accompanied with a biographical and critical notice by Sainte-Beuve; a new edition, with the title Journal, lettres et poèmes, followed in 1862; and an English translation of it was published at New York in 1867. His sister Eugénie was a great influence on him and published some of his works after his death.
Though he was essentially a poet, his prose is more striking and original than his poetry. Its peculiar and unique charm arises from his strong and absorbing passion for nature, a passion whose intensity reached almost to adoration and worship, but in which the pagan was more prominent than the moral element.
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