Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck was a Belgian writer, playwright and philosopher who wrote in French, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1911. He is the author of the philosophical parable-play The Blue Bird, devoted to man's eternal search for an abiding symbol of happiness and the knowledge of being — the Blue Bird itself. His works trace the soul's attempts to reach understanding and love.
Maeterlinck was born in Belgium into the family of a wealthy notary. The household was French-speaking, and it was in French that he would later write most of his work. His first poem appeared in 1883 in the pages of the journal Jeune Belgique. From 1896 he lived in France, chiefly in Paris, where he drew close to the Symbolists, who exerted an enormous influence on him; idealism and symbolism mark his early writing, notably the book The Treasure of the Humble. Fame came with the fairy-tale play Princess Maleine.
In 1909 came the celebrated production of The Blue Bird, in which the heroes travel the world in search of happiness and find it at home. Maeterlinck pursued this phenomenon — man's discontent and his search for happiness — in a sequel to the fantasy, the play The Betrothal. His later plays turned to biblical, fairy-tale and historical subjects. The motif of death runs through all his writing, and in the late work his interest in mysticism and the occult deepens. His philosophical essays engage the philosophy and aesthetics of Symbolism; in the best known of them — The Life of the Bee, The Life of the Termite and The Life of the Ant — he sought to explain human life and activity through analogies drawn from the observation of nature.
In 1911 Maeterlinck received the Nobel Prize in Literature "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy." In 1940 he fled the German occupation for the United States, returning to France in 1947 because of failing health. He died in Nice on 6 May 1949, of a heart attack.