Pierre Jean Jouve

Born Oct. 11, 1887, in Arras. French writer and translator.

Jouve embraced unanimism in 1911–13 and during World War I (1914–18), while living in Switzerland, he became a close friend of R. Rolland. He shared his antiwar views and wrote a book about him entitled The Living R. Rolland (1920). After experiencing a spiritual crisis in the mid-1920’s, he repudiated his former writings; religious and mystical moods are combined with Freudian tendencies in his novels Paulina 1880 (1925), Vagadu (1931), and Bloody Stories (1932) and the poetry collections The Wedding (1928),Bloody Sweat (1934), Heavenly Matter (1937), and Have Mercy, Lord (1938). During World War II (1939–45) after the capitulation of France in 1940, Jouve lived in Geneva and made his mark as an outstanding lyric poet (the collection La Vierge de Paris, 1944) and a journalist of the Resistance. Reflections on the fate of the individual drawn into the century’s catastrophes, which he regarded as precursors of the Apocalypse, also permeated Jouve’s later works (the poetry collections The Diadem, 1949, and The Lyrical, 1956).