Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien, born as Pauline Tarn (1877-November 10, 1909) was an American poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, and was one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school. She wrote verse and prose poetry.
She was born in London, England to a Scottish father and an American mother from Jackson, MI. She and grew up on Long Island, New York, in Paris, France and in London, England; she emigrated to France at an early age. Her dress and lifestyle were as notorious among the bohemian set as her verse was; she lived lavishly, was openly lesbian, and carried on a well known affair with heiress, actress and writer Nathalie Barney. She also carried on a lifelong obsession for her close childhood friend and neighbor Violet Shillito – a relationship that remained unconsummated.
Vivien was cultivated, and well traveled. She had wintered in Egypt, visited China and explored Europe and America. Her contemporaries considered her to be beautiful and elegant, with blonde hair, and brown eyes flecked with gold. Self-Starvation, a factor which contributed to her death, had also made her relatively thin.
She lived lavishly in Paris in a luxurious first floor apartment that opened onto a Japanese garden. Her home was filled with furniture and artworks from the Far East. She also had a love of fresh flowers.
Renee Vivien romanticized death and while visiting London in 1908, deeply despondent and ruinously in debt, she attempted to kill herself by drinking an excess of Laudanum. She stretched out on her divan with a bouquet of violets held over her heart. The suicide failed, but while in England, she contracted pleurisy, and upon her return to Paris, she was considerably weakened and walked with a cane.
She died on November 10, 1909 at the age of 31, of pleurisy, and a body weakened from self-starvation; her death was reported at the time as a suicide, but was possibly the result of anorexia nervosa complicated by pleurisy and alcoholism. Curiously, the poet Arthur Rimbaud died on this same date in 1891.
During her brief life, Renee Vivien was a prolific poet known also as the “Muse of Violets”. The name is derived for her love of the flower, they being a reminder of her childhood love Violet Shillito.
Much of her verse is veiled autobiography written in the French language, and most of it has never been translated into English. Her principal published books of verse are Cendres et Poussières (1902), La Vénus des aveugles (1903), A l'heure des mains jointes (1906), Flambeaux éteints (1907), Sillages (1908), Poèmes en Prose (1909), Dans un coin de violettes (1909), and Haillons (1910).
Her poetry gained a greater acceptance, as did the works of Natalie Barney due to the contemporary rediscovery of the works of Sappho, the ancient Greek poetess; also a lesbian.
Quotation
- Voici la nuit: je vais ensevelir mes morts,
- Mes songes, mes désirs, mes douleurs, mes remords,
- Tout le passé... Je vais ensevelir mes morts.
- ---Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
External link
- Poems by Renée Vivien (in French): http://poesie.webnet.fr/auteurs/vivien.html
- Renee Vivien ou le drame de l'absolu (in French): http://perso.wanadoo.fr/laureline/renee_vivienl.htm