Gustave Kahn


Gustave Kahn was a French Symbolist poet and art critic. He was also active, via publishing and essay-writing, in defining Symbolism and distinguishing it from the Decadent Movement.

Personal life

Kahn was a Jew from Lorraine. He chose sides with Émile Zola in the Dreyfus affair. His wife Elizabeth converted to Judaism as a protest against anti-semitism, changing her name to Rachel.

Poetry

Kahn claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse. He was in any case one of the form's first European exponents. His principal publications include Les Palais nomades, Domaine de fée, and Le Livre d'images. He also made a valuable contribution to the movement's history with his book Symbolistes et décadents.

Other work

In addition to his poems, Kahn was a public intellectual who wrote novels, plays, and literary criticism. He was also extremely influential as a publisher of symbolist writing. Together with Félix Fénéon and Leo d'Orfer, both critics, Kahn founded and then directed La Vogue in 1886. Through that magazine, Kahn and his partners were able to influence the careers of developing decadent writers such as Jules Laforgue, as well as to inject new life into the careers of established figures such as Arthur Rimbaud, whose Les Illuminations manuscript was published in its pages. Together with Jean Moréas, he also founded and directed Le Symboliste, a short-lived journal intended as a counter-point to Anatole Bajule's Le Décadent, which they viewed as a false and exploitative publication that represented a vain, shallow mockery of symbolist thought. He played a key role in a number of other periodicals, including La Revue Indépendante, La Revue Blanche and Le Mercure de France.
He was also an art critic and collector who stayed current with developments in painting and sculpture until his death. He wrote a widely-read obituary for neo-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, in which he suggested a symbolist approach to interpreting the artist's work.
He also played a role in a number of debates on public issues, including anarchism, feminism, socialism, and Zionism.
In the 1920s he was editor of Menorah, a Jewish bimonthly magazine which folded in 1933.
In 1903, American composer Charles Loeffler set four of Kahn's poems to music for piano and voice. The poems were from Les Palais Nomades: Timbres Oublies, Adieu Pour Jamais, Les Soirs d'Automne, and Les Paons.
After his death, his manuscripts were placed in the collection of the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Quotation

Principal works