I do not suppose that anyone today reads the poems of Jean Moréas, and there is perhaps no special need to read him at this moment, though Pound thought him a 'real poet', and so he was, in a now unfashionable way. He was writing 'rhymed free verse,' Pound says, in 1903, and between 1899 and 1906 he wrote several accomplished books of 'Stances' in regular form and of age-long poetic content, some of which stick in the mind:

Palinure au grand coeur, le pilote d'Enée,
      Qui, prudent, d'un fort bras
Guidait le gouvernail, subit la destinée
           Que l'on n'évite pas.

Moréas was a Greek, born in Athens in 1856, and his paternal grandfather had been killed at the siege of Missolonghi. His father was a well-to-do lawyer; the boy had a French governess and very early became acquainted with classical and Renaissance literature. Indeed he said that at the age of ten he had decided that he would be a French poet, and when he went to Paris to follow - 'vaguely', as he says - courses in law he left behind him in Athens a library of nearly two thousand volumes, 'the works of almost all the poets of the Renaissance and our best classics'. I have before now been reproved for giving biographical details of a poet in the pages of PNR, on the grounds that everyone knows such things, but being only a general reader myself ...