Joseph Autran

Joseph Autran (20 June 1813 – 6 March 1877) was a French poet. Biography Autran was born in Marseille. In 1832 he addressed an ode to Alphonse de Lamartine, who was then at Marseille on his way to the East. Lamartine persuaded the young man's father to allow him to follow his poetic instinct, and Autran became Lamartine's faithful disciple from then on. His best known work is La Mer (1835), remodelled in 1852 as Les Poèmes de la mer. Ludibria ventis (1838) followed, and the success of these two volumes gained for Autran the librarianship of his native town. In 1844/5 Franz Liszt, who met Autran in Marseille in 1844, set four of his poems, La terre, Les aquilons, Les flots and Les astres, for choir and piano as a cycle, Les quatre élémens.