Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949)
Author of The Life of the Bee
About the Author
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry, a wide variety of essays, and symbolic dramas, including Pelleas et Melisande (1892). In 1911 he won the Nobel Prize for literature
Image credit: Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery
(image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
(image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
Series
Works by Maurice Maeterlinck
Alladine and Palomides, Interior and The Death of Tintagiles: Three Little Dramas for Marionettes (1899) 16 copies
Gedichten, toneel en proza 15 copies
The Blue Bird for Children The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness (2011) 10 copies
Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless. Two plays ... Translated from the French by Laurence Alma Tadema (1900) 10 copies
The Intruder and Other Plays: The Blind, The Seven Princesses & The Death of Tintagiles (2008) 7 copies
Aglavaine and Selysette ... Translated by Alfred Sutro. With introduction by J. W. Mackail (1908) 5 copies
Hours of gladness, 4 copies
Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi: Three Translations From The Cutting Ball Theater (2011) — Author — 4 copies
Ruysbroeck and the Mystics. With selections from Ruysbroeck ... Translated by J. T. Stoddart 4 copies
Poésies complètes 2 copies
Davanti a Dio 2 copies
Çağrılmadan Gelen 2 copies
Opera Classics Library : Opera study guide and libretto : Debussy : Pelléas et Mélisande (2019) — Librettist — 2 copies
Teatro 2 copies
Maurice Maeterlinck. La Vie de l'espace. La Quatrième dimension. La Culture des songes. Isolement de l'homme. Jeux de l'espace et du temps. Dieu (1928) 2 copies
Le temple enseveli 2 copies
Opere 2 copies
The blue bird ; and, The betrothal 2 copies
Pelleas Et Melisande Et Interieur 2 copies
Teatro scelto 2 copies
Theatre III. Aglavaine et Sylvestre (1896); Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1901); Soeur Beatrice (1901) 2 copies
Happiness and Golden Thoughts from Dickens, Barrie, Tennyson, Stevenson, Kipling, Zimmerman, etc... 2 copies
Внутри / Vnutri = Intérieur 1 copy
El reloj de arena 1 copy
Po©♭sies compl©·tes 1 copy
Le Silence 1 copy
Ancient Egypt 1 copy
Ukjent 1 copy
Shabe Taar Yani Andheri Rat 1 copy
Teatro I 1 copy
The Blue Bird Souvenir Book 1 copy
Çocukların Gecesi 1 copy
Modrý pták 1 copy
Mehiläisten elämä 1 copy
Sabrana djela 1 copy
The Bluebird chooses: Being the story of Maurice Maeterlinck's Play, "The Betrothal, told for children (1926) 1 copy
Home 1 copy
Dramaty wybrane 1 copy
La Belgique en guerre 1 copy
Maeterlinck's Essays 1 copy
The Chrysanthemum 1 copy
The leaf of olive 1 copy
Insectes et Fleurs 1 copy
Novalis 1 copy
Życie mrówek 1 copy
Poesia - Teatro - Prosa 1 copy
Prosa. Tomo II 1 copy
Théâtre II 1 copy
Théâtre I 1 copy
Associated Works
Shakespeare : Oeuvres complètes, tome 2 : Roméo et Juliette (1959) — Translator, some editions — 20 copies
The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories Vol. VI: French & Belgian — Contributor — 4 copies
The Delphian Course : Part Seven : Story of the Drama, Nature Study — Contributor — 4 copies
Bij de uitverkorenen vertalingen uit het oeuvre van geliefde dichters — Contributor — 2 copies
Coronet, April 1941 — Contributor — 1 copy
Shakespeare Théâtre complet. Tome 1/2 et Tome 2/2 (La Pléiade, 19 38) (1938) — Translator, some editions — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Maeterlinck, Maurice
- Legal name
- Maeterlinck, Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard
Count Maeterlinck (from 1932) - Other names
- MAETERLINCK, Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard
MAETERLINCK, Maurice - Birthdate
- 1862-08-29
- Date of death
- 1949-05-06
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Ghent University
Collège de Sainte-Barbara - Occupations
- poet
playwright - Awards and honors
- Nobel Prize (Literature, 1911)
- Relationships
- Wilde, Oscar
Fort, Paul
Mallarmé, Stéphane
Saint-Saëns, Camille
France, Anatole
Rodin, Auguste (show all 8)
Mirbeau, Octave
Proust, Marcel - Short biography
- Né à Gand, Maurice Maeterlinck est l'aîné d'une famille de trois enfants, flamande, bourgeoise, catholique, conservatrice et francophone. Après des études au collège Sainte-Barbe (Sint-Barbara) de Gand, Maeterlinck publie, dès 1885, des poèmes d’inspiration parnassienne dans La Jeune Belgique. Il part à Paris où il rencontre plusieurs écrivains qui vont l'influencer, dont Stéphane Mallarmé et Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Ce dernier lui fait découvrir les richesses de l'idéalisme allemand (Hegel, Schopenhauer). À la même époque, Maeterlinck découvre Ruysbroeck l'Admirable, un mystique flamand du XIVe siècle dont il traduit les écrits (Ornement des noces spirituelles). C'est ainsi qu'il se tourne vers les richesses intuitives du monde germanique en s'éloignant du rationalisme français. Dans cet esprit, il se consacre à Novalis et entre en contact avec le romantisme d'Iéna (Allemagne, 1787-1831, autour d'August et Friedrich Schlegel et de la revue l'Athenäum), précurseur en droite ligne du symbolisme. Les œuvres que publie Maeterlinck entre 1889 et 1896 sont imprégnées de cette influence germanique. C'est en août 1890 qu'il devient célèbre, du jour au lendemain, grâce à un retentissant article d'Octave Mirbeau sur La Princesse Maleine dans Le Figaro. En 1895, il rencontre la cantatrice Georgette Leblanc, sœur de Maurice Leblanc, avec laquelle il tient, vers 1897, un salon parisien fort couru dans la Villa Dupont : on y croise, entre autres, Oscar Wilde, Paul Fort, Stéphane Mallarmé, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anatole France, Auguste Rodin. En 1902, il écrit Monna Vanna, où joue Georgette Leblanc. Il vit avec elle jusqu'en 1918, avant d'épouser, l'année suivante, la jeune actrice Renée Dahon, rencontrée en 1911. Maurice Maeterlinck conçoit lui-même son propre palais au Cap de Nice, Orlamonde, une résidence féérique dans laquelle il vit avec son épouse. En 1921, il signe un manifeste contre la flamandisation de l’Université de Gand, jusqu’alors francophone. Il obtient le prix Nobel de littérature en 1911, puis le Grand Cordon de l'Ordre de Léopold le 12 janvier 1920, avant d'être fait comte par le roi Albert en 1932. En 1935, lors d'un séjour au Portugal, il préface les discours politiques du président Salazar : Une révolution dans la paix. En 1939, il gagne les États-Unis pour la durée de la guerre. De retour en France en 1947, il meurt à Nice en 1949.
- Nationality
- Belgium
- Birthplace
- Gent, België
- Places of residence
- Ghent, Belgium (birth)
Oostakker, Belgium
Paris, France
Nice, France (death) - Place of death
- Nice, Frankrijk
- Burial location
- Chateau Orlamonde, Nice, France
- Associated Place (for map)
- Belgium
Members
Reviews
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2872453.html
This play is about the original Blue Bird of Happiness, which Tyltyl and Mytyl are sent to find by their neighbourhood fairy. Each scene takes them to a different allegorical place - the Fairy Bérylune's palace; the Land of Memory where the children meet their dead grandparents and siblings; the Palace of Night; the Forest, where the trees that have been attacked by the children's woodcutter father come alive; the Palace of Happiness; the graveyard show more where the dead are rising (or perhaps not); and the Kingdom of the Future, inhabited by the souls of children waiting to be born. Massive spoiler alert: it turns out that they had the Blue Bird of Happiness at home all along, and in the last scene it escapes and the play ends with the children breaking the fourth wall asking the audience to help find it again.
This play was first performed in 1908 in Moscow, and became a Broadway hit in 1910, presumably jogging the minds of the Nobel committee (it is the most recent work by Maeterlinck mentioned in their citation). There's a lot more to work with than in Pelléas and Mélisande. Reading through it, I thought how expensive it would be to stage - each scene needs to an elaborate set, different from the rest; the first scene features the magical animation and personification of Tylo the dog, Tylette the cat, and the concepts of Bread, Sugar, Fire, Water and Milk; and there are lots of birds, some of them blue. Tylette the cat is a great villain, conspiring with Night against the children and the dog. The ending is pretty weak but the journey is rather entertaining. I'm not surprised that a Japanese anime studio managed to spin 26 episodes out of it in 1980 (on Youtube, dubbed into Italian, starting here). It would be easy to do this wrong, but fun to try and do it right. show less
This play is about the original Blue Bird of Happiness, which Tyltyl and Mytyl are sent to find by their neighbourhood fairy. Each scene takes them to a different allegorical place - the Fairy Bérylune's palace; the Land of Memory where the children meet their dead grandparents and siblings; the Palace of Night; the Forest, where the trees that have been attacked by the children's woodcutter father come alive; the Palace of Happiness; the graveyard show more where the dead are rising (or perhaps not); and the Kingdom of the Future, inhabited by the souls of children waiting to be born. Massive spoiler alert: it turns out that they had the Blue Bird of Happiness at home all along, and in the last scene it escapes and the play ends with the children breaking the fourth wall asking the audience to help find it again.
This play was first performed in 1908 in Moscow, and became a Broadway hit in 1910, presumably jogging the minds of the Nobel committee (it is the most recent work by Maeterlinck mentioned in their citation). There's a lot more to work with than in Pelléas and Mélisande. Reading through it, I thought how expensive it would be to stage - each scene needs to an elaborate set, different from the rest; the first scene features the magical animation and personification of Tylo the dog, Tylette the cat, and the concepts of Bread, Sugar, Fire, Water and Milk; and there are lots of birds, some of them blue. Tylette the cat is a great villain, conspiring with Night against the children and the dog. The ending is pretty weak but the journey is rather entertaining. I'm not surprised that a Japanese anime studio managed to spin 26 episodes out of it in 1980 (on Youtube, dubbed into Italian, starting here). It would be easy to do this wrong, but fun to try and do it right. show less
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2872453.html
It's quite short, and it's basically about bees. Maeterlinck was a keen bee-keeper, he knew what he was writing about (in this case at least - a later book about termites was allegedly plagiarized), and his enthusiasm is infectious. As the quote above demonstrates, it's a detailed, lyrical and rather passionate work, if somewhat anthropomorphic.
The downside is that, like a lot of nature writing of the time (the book was first published in 1901), it show more is a rather politically conservative text. There is no room here for departure form the natural order; although queens may be overthrown and replaced, this happens only as part of the set natural cycle of returning to the status quo. Bees manifest the importance of knowing your place and sticking to it. I was irresistibly reminded of Laline Paul's The Bees, one of the first books I read for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which turns exactly the same setting into a revolutionary parable. show less
It's quite short, and it's basically about bees. Maeterlinck was a keen bee-keeper, he knew what he was writing about (in this case at least - a later book about termites was allegedly plagiarized), and his enthusiasm is infectious. As the quote above demonstrates, it's a detailed, lyrical and rather passionate work, if somewhat anthropomorphic.
The downside is that, like a lot of nature writing of the time (the book was first published in 1901), it show more is a rather politically conservative text. There is no room here for departure form the natural order; although queens may be overthrown and replaced, this happens only as part of the set natural cycle of returning to the status quo. Bees manifest the importance of knowing your place and sticking to it. I was irresistibly reminded of Laline Paul's The Bees, one of the first books I read for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which turns exactly the same setting into a revolutionary parable. show less
“Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.”
― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) – Playwright, poet and essayist born in Ghent, Belgium and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. I’m new to the author but reading this short work and also a few biographical details of how Maurice Maeterlinck loved life, show more dedicating many hours to careful observations out in nature - flowers, insects, the sky, the stars - for me, above all else, Maurice Maeterlinck is a mystic. And I have found the only way to effectively read a mystic is to meditate on their words slowly and carefully, discovering links between what is being expressed and the depths of one's own interior life. Reading and rereading The Inner Beauty, here are the four lines in particular that really resonated. I am moved to share my own experiences and reflections.
“Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.” –-------------- Our spiritual depth, our spirit, is an inner dimension we feel more than see. But curiously, our soul yearns for those sight and sounds that expand us well beyond the range of words or concepts. There's the story of a prisoner locked away in a dingy cell and what kept his spirits up was the opportunity to behold a flower, just one flower, when he would take his afternoon exercise in the courtyard. Likewise, I recall riding the train to work one morning to a job I found both suffocating and degrading, when I happened upon a beautiful passage in Calvino about the flight of birds. I held that passage close to my heart for days.
As a young man, I had the good fortune to discover during yoga class, the beauty of breath, its fourfold movement: in-breath, the moment of stillness at the base, out-breath, the moment of stillness at the top. The more I became aware of the act of breathing, the more I became a connoisseur of the breath, feeling the full gamut of sensations, progressively more attuned to the subtlety of the entire process. I then moved on from breath awareness to breath control through the many varieties of pranayama techniques, such that for many years now, the breath has taken on an inner beauty that is nothing less than magnificent.
"Beauty is the only element wherewith the soul is organically connected, and it has no other standard of judgment. This is brought home to us at every moment of our life, and is no less evident to the man by whom beauty may more than once have been denied than to him who is ever seeking it in his heart." ----------------------- I can personally attest to the weighty truth articulated here. I recall a time in my life as a teenager, when my soul and its sensitivity to beauty went into deep hibernation. Although I was enveloped by ugliness - coarse, crude and nasty in the extreme - I failed to see or sense all the ugliness. Then one muggy afternoon, age eighteen, sitting in a locker room, waiting to take the field with the other players on the football team, forced to listen to a coach’s ravings, it happened: like receiving a smack by a Zen master’s rōshi stick, as if the ocean wave of my own inner beauty opened my eyes and heart and swept every grimy inch of the foul ugliness away, I awakened. When the other players ran out to take the field, I remained seated. Then, calmly walking over to the equipment room, I turned in my uniform and pads.
The next morning, perfect timing - I attended a class in the humanities where the professor spoke about the beauty of classical music and played a piano sonata by Frédéric Chopin. Ah, how refreshing. how uplifting and how absolutely exhilarating. Such beauty, I reflected, is what I am at my very center, a beauty that is my authentic nature. I never forgot my awakening; I vowed never again to fall into such a deadening slumber. In a real sense, my adult years have been dedicated to maintaining a connection to my own inner light and inner beauty.
"All the doors are unlocked, we have but to push them open, and the palace is full of manacled queens." ---------------------- Similar to John O’Donohue, Maurice Maeterlinck is urging us to "beautify our gaze" since our experiencing beauty out in nature, in other people, in our many encounters on life’s path, is the unfolding of an inner transformation not a change of scenery. This is one prime reason, if I may say so, I attempt to focus on the inspiring and enriching features and qualities of the books and art I review. Considering all the many great authors and artists who have dedicated their lives to their respective mode of expression, I place the burden on myself as reader to open as much as possible in order to uncover literary and artistic gold and behold the beauty and splendor.
“We must cultivate silence among ourselves, for it is then only that for one instant the eternal flowers unfold their petals, the mysterious flowers whose form and colour are ever changing in harmony with the soul that is by their side.” ---------- Over the past years, each time I’ve gone into silent retreat, sometimes a short as one day or as long as two weeks, dedicating my time to meditation and a quiet moving about, I have always emerged refreshed an rejuvenated. Frank, my dear lifelong friend, spent eighteen years in silence as a Trappist monk. Although many years removed from the monastery, anyone who comes in contact with Frank senses the presence of silence in Frank’s every word and gesture. This to say, when we cultivate silence in our own lives, as Maurice Maeterlinck observes, our soul is brought into harmony with nature and the cosmos. What a gift. But in our modern world, it is up to us to make the effort.
An especial gesture of thanks to my good friend Jean-Paul Werner Walshaw-Sauter from Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland for bringing the essays of Maurice Maeterlinck to my attention. show less
I was not particularly happy with Maeterlinck's treatment of this subject, although what annoyed me so much might have been the arrangement made by Sutro and Williams. I found the style to be too flowery and childlike. The information presented was thus interrupted and slowed down such that truth and storytelling were inextricably intertwined, and deciphering what was fact was difficult. So, don't read this to find out how to manage bees or their hives.
Included at the back of the book were show more two stories by Charles G. D. Roberts. I found them, as with all Major Roberts' animal stories, delightful. show less
Included at the back of the book were show more two stories by Charles G. D. Roberts. I found them, as with all Major Roberts' animal stories, delightful. show less
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