Julie Marie Dauguet (née Aubert; 2 April 1860 – 10 September 1942) was a French poet.
Her first collection, À travers le voile, was published in 1902 and noticed by Stuart Merrill, who compared the poet to Verlaine and highlighted her as one of the leading figures of the Belle Époque poetic revival, along with Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Anna de Noailles. After publishing poems in several literary journals, Dauguet published Par l'Amour in 1904, which won the Archon-Despérouses Award in 1905. Its preface, written by Remy de Gourmont, forged his image as a "nature poet", an image later cultivated by critics.
For about a decade, despite living away from Paris, Dauguet was a major figure on the literary scene, and featured in several anthologies. Enjoying a certain popularity, she was also disparaged for her use of free verse and patois words. After (1907), which demonstrated her desire to appear as a literate woman, in contrast to the "peasant poet" image held by critics, her collections (1909) and (1911) oscillated between paganism and eroticism. Having benefited from the enthusiasm for "women's poetry" at the turn of the century, her success declined as critics lost interest in women poets. Overshadowed by the success of other figures to whom she is often compared, such as Delarue-Mardrus and Anna de Noailles, she published two more collections, in 1924 and in 1938, in which the early love of life gives way to disappointment and melancholy. Now largely forgotten, she is the subject of a few rare studies.
Dauguet is both associated with symbolism and naturalism, though she rejected any affiliation with a particular school of thought. Her themes and way of life bring her closer to Francis Jammes, whom she admits to admiring but denies imitating. Her evocations of nature reveal a pantheistic vision of the world. Throughout her collections, she personifies nature as a lover, using overtly sensual metaphors from onwards. One of the most characteristic features of her poetry is her use of "odoural" images, a term coined for her by Remy de Gourmont and regularly used thereafter to describe the precision with which she evokes the scents of nature.
Biography
Youth and first poems (1860-1902) Julie Marie Aubert was born on April 2, 1860, at La Chaudeau, a hamlet of Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont.Gérard Walch describes La Chaudeau as an "old forge picturesquely nestled in the hollow of one of the wildest valleys in the Vosges mountains" (Walch 1907, p. 434). The present-day commune of Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont has two La Chaudeau localities, one of which was built for the widow of a forge master in the early 19th century. in Haute-Saône, the daughter of Louis-Ferdinand Aubert, a wire-drawing manager, and Pauline Rose Charlotte Hamelin. In 1875, her father bought a property called Le Beuchot, in Hautevelle. She grew up surrounded by her parents, who gave her a taste for the arts. She enjoyed a free education and grew up in the heart of nature, in the foothills of the Vosges mountains, spending her time studying botany and everything around her, painting and playing music.
In her childhood, she enjoyed a free education and lived surrounded by nature, which from then on became a subject of study to her. She wrote to Alphonse Séché, for the anthology of women poets he published in 1908: "I have wasted a lot of time on various dilettantisms, ranging from physiology to botany; interested in plants, beasts, everything that is life; dividing my hours between fields, gardens, stables, painting, music and books." A first book published in 1897, , went unnoticed.Carmen Ramírez Gómez, in her study of the critical reception of Marie Dauguet (Ramírez Gómez 2021), makes no mention of this book. Émile Faguet wrote in 1902: " Madame Marie Dauguet began in 1897 with a volume, La Naissance du Poète, which I do not know, and which I do not know whether it is verse or prose, and which I beg her to send me. A poem by Francis Jammes published in 1897 bears the same title (Read on Wikisource, In French). On a winter's day in 1899, she wrote her first poem, , and went on to compile her first collection, . She continued to paint and play music, admiring Frédéric Chopin in particular, and conceived most of her poems on the piano before writing them.
Success (1902-1914)
À travers le voile and press publications
Dauguet published his first collection, À travers le voile, in 1902, just a few years after the emergence of literary naturism, founded by Maurice Le Blond and Saint-Georges de Bouhélier. This movement rejected symbolism and advocated simplicity, sincerity and a love of life and nature, qualities that Stuart Merrill attributed to the women poets whose work he commented on in an article published in La Plume in 1903. Women poets, left out in the 1880s and 1890s, were the subject of a certain interest from critics around 1900, who praised or criticized them. Merrill's article was one of the first to give them greater visibility. Marie Dauguet was one of the leading figures in what was then known as "feminine lyricism",Several books and articles from the period aim to define this "feminine lyricism", including Jules Bertaut's La Littérature Féminine d'aujourd'hui (1909) and Charles Maurras' Le Romantisme féminin (1905). For Patricia Izquierdo, these various expressions, which were very much in vogue at the time, aim to circumscribe female poets to a single type of writing (Izquierdo 2010). along with Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Marie de Heredia, Anna de Noailles and Renée Vivien, and the lesser-known Hélène Picard, Marie Krysinska, Marguerite Burnat-Provins and Marie Closset. Often quoted in the literary press, she receives less attention than Delarue-Mardrus and Anna de Noailles, although she is sometimes considered their equal. Regarding Dauguet, Merrill judges that "a great and true poet has been born to us", and compares her poem to Verlaine's . La Plume subsequently published several of Dauguet's poems, as did La Fronde, L'Ermitage and Mercure de France. The , originally a Symbolist journal, evolved in the 1890s, welcoming more varied poetic trends between 1896 and 1904. We read poems by Isabelle Crombez, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Francis Jammes and Paul Fort. Several of Dauguet's poems published in the press in 1903 were included in the collection r, which ensured Dauguet's growing success.
Par l'Amour success Par l'Amour, published in 1904, was prefaced by one of the founders of the Mercure du France, Remy de Gourmont. His articles on Dauguet, and even more so his preface, were instrumental in forging his image as a "nature poet." This open support from Remy de Gourmont, a prominent figure in literary circles, ensured success for Dauguet, who lived far from Paris. won the Académie française's Award Archon-Despérouses in 1905, which meant that the poet was often mentioned by literary critics, who generally compared her to Delarue-Mardrus and Anna de Noailles. An anonymous reviewer for the journal drew up a pantheon of poets, in which Dauguet was associated with Alfred de Vigny. For her part, Dauguet declares that she imitates only Ronsard, and gets her inspiration from the poems of Francis Jammes, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Henri de Latouche, Sainte-Beuve and folk songs. While it enjoys a certain visibility, it is also criticized negatively for its use of free verse, patois words, outdated expressions or, on the contrary, neologisms.
Following a trip to Italy, during which she visited Rome, Venice and Naples, she published an account of her journey, (1907). Alternating between verse and prose, it evokes her vertigo in the face of centuries of history:
While Émile Faguet, in his review of , deplored the " cheap paganism" of Dauguet, Jean de Gourmont emphasized another aspect of the poet, who was no longer just a poet of nature, but also an art critic. Contrary to the portrait forged by Remy de Gourmont, Dauguet insisted on appearing intellectual, cultured and literate, and on being a figure of the female elite of the Belle Époque.
Les Pastorales of a "pantheist poet" After the publication of Les Pastorales, dedicated to Virgil, in 1909, critics increasingly defined Dauguet by her pantheism.In 1911, Robert Veyssié called Dauguet "the pantheistic poet of the Pastorales" on the occasion of the release of l'Essor victorieux (Ramírez Gómez 2021, p. 91). Her poems oscillate between paganism, mysticism and eroticism (which sometimes makes critics uncomfortable), and make it difficult to classify her. She is considered a great poet, but is often judged inferior to Anna de Noailles and Hélène Picard, and her use of free verse is still badly regarded.
In 1911, Dauguet published , in which she once again highlighted her love of nature. Her book received more or less positive reviews: "a work of art and passion that places its author in the first rank of our poetesses and even of our poets" according to La Liberté, Marie Dauguet has "a deeper sensitivity [than Hélène Picard]" but "her expression remains almost always imperfect" according to Le Temps. Critics place this book under the sign of Baudelaire and Nietzsche. Difficult to classify like other female poets, Dauguet is considered an exception by some critics, who describe her with masculine characteristics. For a critic of , there is "nothing feminine in []: it is a work of virile beauty almost inconceivable from the pen of a woman." Thilda Harlor, on the other hand, takes advantage of a review of in La Fronde to defend Dauguet, both poet and woman, and Héra Mirtel sees in L'Essor victorieux the victory of feminine beauty and purity. According to Norman R. Shapiro, the poem , written in the first person and in the masculine, shows Dauguet's desire to be considered solely for her art, without regard for her gender. Dauguet was the subject of entries in nine anthologies published between 1906 and 1914.
Oblivion (1914-1942) After 1910, although female poets were still publishing, "feminine lyricism" had lost its novelty appeal and critical visibility. In 1914, Alphonse Séché cited Dauguet as one of the finest poets of her time, alongside Émile Verhaeren, Henri de Régnier, Francis Jammes, Louis Le Cardonnel, Fernand Gregh, Paul Claudel, Anna de Noailles and Hélène Picard. Some of her poems were set to music, but after her first successes, boosted by Remy de Gourmont's reviews and publications in the press, she gradually fell into oblivion.
In 1924, she published a new book, Ce n'est rien, c'est la Vie, which received positive reviews from Henri de Régnier in and André Fontainas in . Régnier, then a member of the Académie française, lamented that Dauguet "does not occupy the position she deserves in poetry." For Fontainas, there is "never a hint of mawkishness in Mme Dauguet's robust, healthy, vibrant and magnificent art." He described her as living in seclusion, isolated in the countryside, "a stranger to the petty competitions [...] of our miserable literary world." In Dauguet's last collection, Passions, published in 1938, the themes of death and disappointment with life become more prominent:
The collection also includes numerous poems dedicated to nature, as well as a Christian-inspired section, "." Passions was again reviewed in the , but this time Fontainas was disappointed, regretting "a tendency to adulterate the purity of his rural, floral, woodland visions, by a desire to climb to more general thoughts, to the expression of philosophical conclusions."
Personal life On July 5, 1881, she married Henri Dauguet, who succeeded her father at the Chaudeau forges. He was a childhood friend, whom she described as "cultivated in spirit" and "open to anything that came to me from my thoughts or dreams." The couple had one daughter, Suzanne Pauline, born on April 6, 1882, and died in 1957.
After her husband's death in 1924, she moved to Enghien-les-Bains (now Val-d'Oise). She died on September 10, 1942, in a retirement home in Ville-d'Avray.