French poetry
Encyclopedia
French poetry is a category of French literature
. It may include Francophone
poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.
does not have a significant stress accent (like English) or long and short syllables (like Latin). This means that the French metric line is generally not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables (see syllabic verse
; in the Renaissance, there was a brief attempt to develop a French poetics based on long and short syllables [see "musique mesurée
"]). The most common metric
lengths are the ten-syllable line (decasyllable
), the eight-syllable line (octosyllable
) and the twelve-syllable line (the so-called "alexandrin
").
In traditional French poetry, all permissible liaison
s are made between words. Furthermore, unlike modern spoken French (at least in the north of France), a silent or mute 'e' counts as a syllable before a consonant and is pronounced, but is elided
before a vowel (where "h aspiré" counts as a consonant). When it falls at the end of a line, the mute "e" is hypermetrical (outside the count of syllables). (For more on pronunciation of French, see French phonology
).
The ten-syllable and 12-syllable lines are generally marked by a regular syntactical pause, called a "césure" (cesura):
In traditional poetry, the césure cannot occur between two words that are syntactically linked (such as a subject and its verb), nor can it occur after an unelided mute e. (For more on poetic meter, see Poetic meter
.)
For example:
The verses are alexandrines (12 syllables). The mute e in "d'une" is pronounced and is counted in the syllables (whereas the mute e's at the end of "rêve", "étrange", "femme" and "j'aime" -- which are followed by vowels—are elided and hypermetrical); the mute e at the end of "qui m'aime" is hypermetrical (this is a so-called "feminine rhyme
"). No word occurs across the sixth to seventh syllable in both lines, thus creating the cesura.
The rules of classical French poetry (from the late 16th to the 18th century) also put forward the following:
For more on rhymes in French poetry, see Rhyme in French.
Poetic forms developed by medieval French poets include:
Other poetic forms found in French poetry:
is the earliest French literature; the development of prose
as a literary form was a late phenomenon (in the late Middle Ages, many of the romances and epic
s initially written in verse were converted into prose versions). In the medieval period, the choice of verse form was generally dictated by the genre: the Old French epics ("chanson de geste
", like the anonymous Song of Roland, regarded by some as the national epic
of France) were usually written in ten-syllable assonanced "laisses" (blocks of varying length of assonance
d lines), while the chivalric romances
("roman", such as the tales of King Arthur
written by Chrétien de Troyes
) were usually written in octosyllabic rhymed couplet
s.
Medieval French lyric poetry was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence
-- including Toulouse
, Poitiers
, and the Aquitaine
region—where "langue d'oc" was spoken (Occitan language); in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab
world. The Occitan or Provençal poets were called troubadour
s, from the word "trobar" (to find, to invent). Lyric poets in Old French are called "trouvères", using the Old French version of the word (for more information on the "trouvères", their poetic forms, extant works and their social status, see the article of that name). The occitan troubadours were amazingly creative in the development of verse forms and poetic genres, but their greatest impact on medieval literature was perhaps in their elaboration of complex code of love and service called "fin amors" or, more generally, courtly love
. For more information on the troubadour tradition, see Provençal literature
.
By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic (as well as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name) tendencies are apparent in the Roman de Fauvel
in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church filled with medieval motets, lai
s, rondeaux
and other new secular forms of poetry and music (mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry
who would coin the expression Ars nova
[new art, or new technique] to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age). The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chanson
s was Guillaume de Machaut
. (For more on music, see medieval music
; for more on music in the period after Machaux, see Renaissance music
).
French poetry continued to evolve in the 15th century. Charles, duc d'Orléans
was a noble and head of one of the most powerful families in France during the Hundred Years' War
. Captured in the Battle of Agincourt
, he was a prisoner of the English from 1415–1441 and his ballades often speak of loss and isolation. Christine de Pisan was one of the most prolific writers of her age; her "Cité des Dames" is considered a kind of "feminist manifesto". François Villon
was a student and vagabond whose two poetic "testaments" or "wills" are celebrated for their portrayal of the urban and university environment of Paris and their scabrous wit, satire and verbal puns. The image of Villon as vagabond poet seems to have gained almost mythic status in the 16th century, and this figure would be championed by poetic rebels of the 19th century and 20th centuries (see Poète maudit
).
and Jean Molinet
), generally called "les Grands Rhétoriqueurs
" who continued to develop poetic techniques from the previous century. Soon however, the impact of Petrarch
(the sonnet cycle
addressed to an idealised lover, the use of amorous pardoxes), Italian poets in the French court (like Luigi Alamanni
), Italian Neo-platonism and humanism
, and the rediscovery of certain Greek poets (such as Pindar
and Anacreon) would profoundly modify the French tradition. In this respect, the French poets Clément Marot
and Mellin de Saint-Gelais
are transitional figures: they are credited with some of the first sonnet
s in French, but their poems continue to employ many of the traditional forms.
The new direction of poetry is fully apparent in the work of the humanist Jacques Peletier du Mans
. In 1541, he published the first French translation of Horace
's "Ars poetica" and in 1547 he published a collection poems "Œuvres poétiques", which included translations from the first two cantos of Homer
's Odyssey
and the first book of Virgil
's Georgics
, twelve Petrarch
ian sonnet
s, three Horacian
ode
s and a Martial-like
epigram
; this poetry collection also included the first published poems of Joachim Du Bellay
and Pierre de Ronsard
.
Around Ronsard, Du Bellay and Jean Antoine de Baïf there formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court (generally known today as La Pléiade
, although use of this term is debated). The character of their literary program was given in Du Bellay's manifesto, the "Defense and Illustration of the French Language" (1549) which maintained that French (like the Tuscan of Petrarch
and Dante
) was a worthy language for literary expression and which promulgated a program of linguistic and literary production (including the imitation of Latin and Greek genres) and purification. For some of the members of the Pléiade, the act of the poetry itself was seen as a form of divine inspiration (see Pontus de Tyard
for example), a possession by the muse
s akin to romantic passion, prophetic fervor or alcoholic delirium.
The forms that dominate the poetic production of the period are the Petrarch
ian sonnet cycle
(developed around an amorous encounter or an idealized woman) and the Horace
/Anacreon ode
(especially of the "carpe diem
" - life is short, seize the day - variety). Ronsard also tried early on to adapt the Pindar
ic ode into French. Throughout the period, the use of mythology
is frequent, but so too is a depiction of the natural world (woods, rivers). Other genres include the paradoxical encomium
(such as Remy Belleau
's poem prasing the oyster), the "blason
" of the female body (a poetic description of a body part), and propagandistic verse.
Several poets of the period—Jean Antoine de Baïf (who founded an "Académie de Poésie et Musique" in 1570), Blaise de Vigenère
and others—attempted to adapt into French the Latin
, Greek
or Hebrew
poetic meters; these experiments were called "vers mesurés" and "prose mesuré" (for more, see the article "musique mesurée
").
Although the royal court was the center of much of the century's poetry, Lyon
– the second largest city in France in the Renaissance – also had its poets and humanists, most notably Maurice Scève
, Louise Labé
, Olivier de Magny and Pontus de Tyard
. Scève's Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu - composed of 449 ten syllable ten line poems (dizains) and published with numerous engraved emblem
s - is exemplary in its use of amorous paradoxes and (often obscure) allegory
to describe the suffering of a lover.
Poetry at the end of the century was profoundly marked by the civil wars
: pessimism, dourness and a call for retreat from the world predominate (as in Jean de Sponde
). However, the horrors of the war were also to inspire one Protestant poet, Agrippa d'Aubigné
, to write a brilliant poem on the conflict:Les Tragiques.
Poetry was used for all purposes. A great deal of 17th- and 18th-century poetry was "occasional", written to celebrate a particular event
(a marriage, birth, military victory) or to solemnize a tragic occurrence (a death, military defeat), and this kind of poetry was frequent with gentlemen in the service of a noble or the king. Poetry was the chief form of 17th century theater: the vast majority of scripted plays were written in verse (see "Theater" below). Poetry was used in satires (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
is famous for his "Satires" (1666)) and in epics (inspired by the Renaissance epic tradition and by Tasso
) like Jean Chapelain
's La Pucelle.
Although French poetry during the reign of Henri IV and Louis XIII was still largely inspired by the poets of the late Valois court
, some of their excesses and poetic liberties found censure, especially in the work of François de Malherbe
who criticized La Pléiade
's and Philippe Desportes
's irregularities of meter or form (the suppression of the cesura by a hiatus
, sentences clauses spilling over into the next line "enjambement", neologisms constructed from Greek words, etc.). The later 17th century would see Malherbe as the grandfather of poetic classicism.
Poetry came to be a part of the social games in noble salons (see "salons" above), where epigrams, satirical verse, and poetic descriptions were all common (the most famous example is "La Guirlande de Julie" (1641) at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a collection of floral poems written by the salon members for the birthday of the host's daughter). The linguistic aspects of the phenomenon associated with the "précieuses
" (similar to Euphuism
in England, Gongorism
in Spain and Marinism in Italy) -- the use of highly metaphorical (sometimes obscure) language, the purification of socially unacceptable vocabulary—was tied to this poetic salon spirit and would have an enormous impact on French poetic and courtly language. Although "préciosité" was often mocked (especially in the later 1660s when the phenomenon had spread to the provinces) for its linguistic and romantic excesses (often linked to a misogynistic disdain for intellectual women), the French language and social manners of the 17th century were permanently changed by it.
From the 1660s, three poets stand out. Jean de La Fontaine
gained enormous celebrity through his Aesop
inspired "Fables" (1668–1693) which were written in an irregular verse form (different meter lengths are used in a poem). Jean Racine
was seen as the greatest tragedy writer of his age. Finally, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
became the theorizer of poetic classicism: his "Art poétique" (1674) praised reason and logic (Boileau elevated Malherbe as the first of the rational poets), believability, moral usefulness and moral correctness; it elevated tragedy and the poetic epic as the great genres and recommended imitation of the poets of antiquity.
"Classicism" in poetry would dominate until the pre-romantics and the French Revolution.
From a technical point of view, the poetic production from the late 17th century on increasingly relied on stanza forms incorporating rhymed couplets, and by the 18th century fixed-form poems – and, in particular, the sonnet – were largely avoided. The resulting versification – less constrained by meter and rhyme patterns than Renaissance poetry – more closely mirrored prose.
, associated with such authors as Victor Hugo
, Alphonse de Lamartine
, and Gérard de Nerval
. The effect of the romantic movement would continue to be felt in the latter half of the century in wildly diverse literary developments, such as "realism", "symbolism", and the so-called fin de siècle "decadent" movement
(see below). Victor Hugo was the outstanding genius of the Romantic School and its recognized leader. He was prolific alike in poetry, drama, and fiction. Other writers associated with the movement were the austere and pessimistic Alfred de Vigny
, Théophile Gautier
a devotee of beauty and creator of the "Art for art's sake
" movement, and Alfred de Musset
, who best exemplifies romantic melancholy.
By the middle of the century, an attempt to be objective was made in poetry by the group of writers known as the Parnassians -- which included Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville
, Catulle Mendès
, Sully-Prudhomme, François Coppée
, José María de Heredia
and (early in his career) Paul Verlaine
-- who (using Théophile Gautier
's notion of art for art's sake
and the pursuit of the beautiful) strove for exact and faultless workmanship, and selected exotic and classical subjects which they treated with a rigidity of form and an emotional detachment (elements of which echo the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer
whose aesthetic theories
would also have an influence on the symbolists).
The naturalist tendency to see life without illusions and to dwell on its more depressing and sordid aspects appears in an intensified degree in the immensely influential poetry of Charles Baudelaire
, but with profoundly romantic elements derived from the Byronic myth of the anti-hero and the romantic poet
The poetry of Baudelaire and much of the literature in the latter half of the century (or "fin de siècle
") were often characterized as "decadent" for their lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Paul Verlaine
used the expression "poète maudit
" ("accursed poet") in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Tristan Corbière
, Stéphane Mallarmé
and Arthur Rimbaud
who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or had been ignored by the critics. But with the publication of Jean Moréas
"Symbolist Manifesto" in 1886, it was the term symbolism
which was most often applied to the new literary environment.
The writers Stéphane Mallarmé
, Paul Verlaine
, Paul Valéry
, Joris-Karl Huysmans
, Arthur Rimbaud
, Jules Laforgue
, Jean Moréas
, Gustave Kahn
, Albert Samain
, Jean Lorrain
, Rémy de Gourmont
, Pierre Louÿs
, Tristan Corbière
, Henri de Régnier
, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Stuart Merrill
, René Ghil, Saint-Pol Roux, Oscar-Vladislas de Milosz
, the Belgians Albert Giraud
, Emile Verhaeren
, Georges Rodenbach
and Maurice Maeterlinck
and others have been called symbolists, although each author's personal literary project was unique.
From a technical point of view, the Romantics were responsible for a return to (and sometimes a modification of) many of the fixed-form poems used during the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as for the creation of new forms. The sonnet however was little used until the Parnassians brought it back into favor, and the sonnet would subsequently find its most significant practitioner in Charles Baudelaire
. The traditional French sonnet form was however significantly modified by Baudelaire, who used 32 different forms of sonnet with non-traditional rhyme patterns to great effect in his Les Fleurs du mal
.
radicalized the Baudelairian poetic exploration of modern life in evoking planes, the Eiffel Tower and urban wastelands, and he brought poetry into contact with cubism through his "Calligrammes
", a form of visual poetry
. Inspired by Rimbaud, Paul Claudel
used a form of free verse to explore his mystical conversion to Catholicism. Other poets from this period include: Paul Valéry
, Max Jacob
(a key member of the group around Apollinaire), Pierre Jean Jouve
(a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism"), Valery Larbaud
(a translator of Whitman and friend to Joyce), Victor Segalen
(friend to Huysmans and Claudel), Léon-Paul Fargue
(who studied with Stéphane Mallarmé
and was close to Valéry and Larbaud).
The First World War generated even more radical tendencies. The Dada
movement—which began in a café in Switzerland in 1916—came to Paris in 1920, but by 1924 the writers around Paul Éluard
, André Breton
, Louis Aragon
and Robert Desnos
-- heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud
's notion of the unconscious
-- had modified dada provocation into Surrealism
. In writing and in the visual arts, and by using automatic writing
, creative games (like the cadavre exquis) and altered states (through alcohol and narcotics), the surrealists tried to reveal the workings of the unconscious mind. The group championed previous writers they saw as radical (Arthur Rimbaud
, the Comte de Lautréamont
, Baudelaire) and promoted an anti-bourgeois philosophy (particularly with regards to sex and politics) which would later lead most of them to join the communist party. Other writers associated with surrealism include: Jean Cocteau
, René Crevel
, Jacques Prévert
, Jules Supervielle
, Benjamin Péret
, Philippe Soupault
, Pierre Reverdy
, Antonin Artaud
(who revolutionized theater), Henri Michaux
and René Char
. The surrealist movement would continue to be a major force in experimental writing and the international art world until the Second World War.
The effects of surrealism would later also be felt among authors who were not strictly speaking part of the movement, such as the poet Alexis Saint-Léger Léger (who wrote under the name Saint-John Perse
), the poet Edmond Jabès
(who came to France in 1956 when the Jewish population was expelled from his native Egypt) and Georges Bataille
. The Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars
was close to Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and the artists Chagall and Léger, and his work has similarities with both surrealism and cubism.
Poetry in the post-war period followed a number of interlinked paths, most notably deriving from surrealism (such as with the early work of René Char
), or from philosophical and phenomenological concerns stemming from Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin
, existentialism, the relationship between poetry and the visual arts, and Stéphane Mallarmé
's notions of the limits of language. Another important influence was the German poet Paul Celan
. Poets concerned with these philosophical/language concerns—especially concentrated around the review "L'Ephémère" -- include Yves Bonnefoy
, André du Bouchet
, Jacques Dupin
, Roger Giroux
and Philippe Jaccottet
. Many of these ideas were also key to the works of Maurice Blanchot
. The unique poetry of Francis Ponge
exerted a strong influence on a variety of writers (both phenomenologists and those from the group "Tel Quel
"). The later poets Claude Royet-Journoud
, Anne-Marie Albiach
, Emmanuel Hocquard
, and to a degree Jean Daive
, describe a shift from Heidegger to Ludwig Wittgenstein
and a reevaluation of Mallarmé's notion of fiction and theatricality; these poets were also influenced by certain English-language modern poets (such as Ezra Pound
, Louis Zukofsky
, William Carlos Williams
, and George Oppen
) along with certain American postmodern and avant garde poets loosely grouped around the language poetry movement.
s and troubadour
s)
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
. It may include Francophone
Francophone literature
Francophone literature is literature written in the French language. Most often the term is misused to refer only to literature from francophone countries outside France, but this category includes French Literature, or Literature of France, that is literature written by French authors...
poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.
French prosody and poetics
The modern French languageFrench language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
does not have a significant stress accent (like English) or long and short syllables (like Latin). This means that the French metric line is generally not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables (see syllabic verse
Syllabic verse
Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed number of syllables per line regardless of the number of stresses that are present. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as Japanese or modern French or Finnish — as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which...
; in the Renaissance, there was a brief attempt to develop a French poetics based on long and short syllables [see "musique mesurée
Musique mesurée
Musique mesurée, or Musique mesurée à l'antique, was a style of vocal musical composition in France in the late 16th century. In musique mesurée, longer syllables in the French language were set to longer note values, and shorter syllables to shorter, in a homophonic texture but in a situation of...
"]). The most common metric
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
lengths are the ten-syllable line (decasyllable
Decasyllable
Decasyllable is a poetic meter of ten syllables used in poetic traditions of syllabic verse...
), the eight-syllable line (octosyllable
Octosyllable
The octosyllable or octosyllabic verse is a line of verse with eight syllables. It is equivalent to tetrameter verse in iambs or trochees in languages with a stress accent. It is often used in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetry...
) and the twelve-syllable line (the so-called "alexandrin
Alexandrine
An alexandrine is a line of poetic meter comprising 12 syllables. Alexandrines are common in the German literature of the Baroque period and in French poetry of the early modern and modern periods. Drama in English often used alexandrines before Marlowe and Shakespeare, by whom it was supplanted...
").
In traditional French poetry, all permissible liaison
Liaison (linguistics)
Liaison is the pronunciation of a latent word-final consonant immediately before a following vowel sound. In French, most written word-final consonants are no longer pronounced and are known as latent or mute...
s are made between words. Furthermore, unlike modern spoken French (at least in the north of France), a silent or mute 'e' counts as a syllable before a consonant and is pronounced, but is elided
Elision
Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
before a vowel (where "h aspiré" counts as a consonant). When it falls at the end of a line, the mute "e" is hypermetrical (outside the count of syllables). (For more on pronunciation of French, see French phonology
French phonology
This article mainly discusses the phonological system of standard French based on the Parisian dialect. French is notable for its uvular r, nasal vowels, and three processes affecting word-final sounds: liaison, a certain type of sandhi, wherein word-final consonants are not pronounced unless...
).
The ten-syllable and 12-syllable lines are generally marked by a regular syntactical pause, called a "césure" (cesura):
- The ten-syllable line is often broken into syntactical groups as 5-5, 4-6, or 6-4.
- The alexandrine is broken into two six-syllable groups; each six-syllable group is called a "hémistiche".
In traditional poetry, the césure cannot occur between two words that are syntactically linked (such as a subject and its verb), nor can it occur after an unelided mute e. (For more on poetic meter, see Poetic meter
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
.)
For example:
The verses are alexandrines (12 syllables). The mute e in "d'une" is pronounced and is counted in the syllables (whereas the mute e's at the end of "rêve", "étrange", "femme" and "j'aime" -- which are followed by vowels—are elided and hypermetrical); the mute e at the end of "qui m'aime" is hypermetrical (this is a so-called "feminine rhyme
Feminine rhyme
A feminine rhyme is a rhyme that matches two or more syllables, usually at the end of respective lines, in which the final syllable or syllables are unstressed.-English:...
"). No word occurs across the sixth to seventh syllable in both lines, thus creating the cesura.
The rules of classical French poetry (from the late 16th to the 18th century) also put forward the following:
- the encounter of two unelided and awkward vowel sounds ("hiatusHiatus (linguistics)In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....
") -- such as "il a à" -- was to be avoided; - the alternance of masculine and feminine rhymeFeminine rhymeA feminine rhyme is a rhyme that matches two or more syllables, usually at the end of respective lines, in which the final syllable or syllables are unstressed.-English:...
s (a feminine rhyme ends in a mute e) was mandated; - rhymes based on words that rhymed, but that—in their spellings—had dissimilar endings (such as a plural in s or x and a singular word) were prohibited (this was the "rhyme for the eye" rule);
- a word could not be made to rhyme with itself;
- in general, "enjambement" (in which the syntax of a sentence does not finish at the end of a line, but continues on into the next verse) was to be avoided.
For more on rhymes in French poetry, see Rhyme in French.
Poetic forms developed by medieval French poets include:
- BalladeBalladeThe ballade is a form of French poetry. It was one of the three formes fixes and one of the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries....
- Rondeau (poetry)Rondeau (poetry)This article is about the poetry form. For other uses, see Rondeau.A rondeau is a form of French poetry with 15 lines written on two rhymes, as well as a corresponding musical form developed to set this characteristic verse structure...
(or Rondel) - Ditié
- Dits moraux
- Blason
- LaiLaiA lai is a lyrical, narrative poem written in octosyllabic couplets that often deals with tales of adventure and romance.Lais were mainly composed in France and Germany, during the 13th and 14th centuries. A Provençal term for a similar kind of poem is descort.The English term lay is a...
- VirelaiVirelaiA virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music. It is one of the three formes fixes and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.A virelai is similar to a rondeau...
- PastourellePastourelleThe pastourelle is a typically Old French lyric form concerning the romance of a shepherdess. In most of the early pastourelles, the poet knight meets a shepherdess who bests him in a wit battle and who displays general coyness. The narrator usually has sexual relations, either consensual or...
- Complainte
- ChansonChansonA chanson is in general any lyric-driven French song, usually polyphonic and secular. A singer specialising in chansons is known as a "chanteur" or "chanteuse" ; a collection of chansons, especially from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, is also known as a chansonnier.-Chanson de geste:The...
- Chanson de toileChanson de toileThe Chanson de toile was a genre of narrative Old French lyric poetry devised by the trouvères which flourished in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. Some fifteen of them remain; five were written by Audefroi le Bastart, the others are anonymous...
("weaving song") - Chanson de croisade
- Chanson courtoise
- RotrouengeRotrouengeIn the Middle Ages, the rotrouenge or retroencha was a recognised type of lyric poetry, although no existing source defines the genre clearly. There are four conserved troubadour poems, all with refrains and three by Guiraut Riquier with music, that are labelled retronchas in the chansonniers...
- Chanson de toile
- Chant royalChant royalThe Chant Royal is a poetic form that is a variation of the ballad form and consists of five eleven-line stanzas with a rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-c-c-d-d-e-d-E and a five-line envoi rhyming d-d-e-d-E or a seven-line envoi c-c-d-d-e-d-E...
- AubeAlba (poetry)The alba is a subgenre of Occitan lyric poetry. It describes the longing of lovers who, having passed a night together, must separate for fear of being discovered by their respective spouses....
("dawn poem") - Jeu partiJeu partiJeu parti [Fr.; Occitan joc partit, “partimen”]. A debate or dialogue in the form of a poem. According to Guilhem Molinier, the author of Las leys d'amors, a 13th-century treatise on how to write poetry in the style of the troubadours, there is a clear difference between a partimen and a tenso: in...
Other poetic forms found in French poetry:
- VillanelleVillanelleA villanelle is a poetic form that entered English-language poetry in the 19th century from the imitation of French models. The word derives from the Italian villanella from Latin villanus . A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds...
- Virelai nouveauVirelai nouveauThe virelai nouveau is a poetic form that is both rare and difficult to use. Its chief characteristic is the use of a double refrain and the fact that is uses two rhymes only. The poem opens with a couplet and these two lines are used as the refrain in alternating stanzas. The poem ends with an...
- SonnetSonnetA sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
- OdeOdeOde is a type of lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist...
Medieval
As is the case in other literary traditions, poetryPoetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
is the earliest French literature; the development of prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
as a literary form was a late phenomenon (in the late Middle Ages, many of the romances and epic
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
s initially written in verse were converted into prose versions). In the medieval period, the choice of verse form was generally dictated by the genre: the Old French epics ("chanson de geste
Chanson de geste
The chansons de geste, Old French for "songs of heroic deeds", are the epic poems that appear at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known examples date from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, nearly a hundred years before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the trouvères and...
", like the anonymous Song of Roland, regarded by some as the national epic
National epic
A national epic is an epic poem or a literary work of epic scope which seeks or is believed to capture and express the essence or spirit of a particular nation; not necessarily a nation-state, but at least an ethnic or linguistic group with aspirations to independence or autonomy...
of France) were usually written in ten-syllable assonanced "laisses" (blocks of varying length of assonance
Assonance
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...
d lines), while the chivalric romances
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
("roman", such as the tales of King Arthur
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
written by Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes was a French poet and trouvère who flourished in the late 12th century. Perhaps he named himself Christian of Troyes in contrast to the illustrious Rashi, also of Troyes...
) were usually written in octosyllabic rhymed couplet
Couplet
A couplet is a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the same meter.While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do. A poem may use white space to mark out couplets if they do not rhyme. Couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter are called heroic...
s.
Medieval French lyric poetry was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence
Provence
Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
-- including Toulouse
Toulouse
Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...
, Poitiers
Poitiers
Poitiers is a city on the Clain river in west central France. It is a commune and the capital of the Vienne department and of the Poitou-Charentes region. The centre is picturesque and its streets are interesting for predominant remains of historical architecture, especially from the Romanesque...
, and the Aquitaine
Aquitaine
Aquitaine , archaic Guyenne/Guienne , is one of the 27 regions of France, in the south-western part of metropolitan France, along the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountain range on the border with Spain. It comprises the 5 departments of Dordogne, :Lot et Garonne, :Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Landes...
region—where "langue d'oc" was spoken (Occitan language); in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab
Arabic literature
Arabic literature is the writing produced, both prose and poetry, by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is adab which is derived from a meaning of etiquette, and implies politeness, culture and enrichment....
world. The Occitan or Provençal poets were called troubadour
Troubadour
A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
s, from the word "trobar" (to find, to invent). Lyric poets in Old French are called "trouvères", using the Old French version of the word (for more information on the "trouvères", their poetic forms, extant works and their social status, see the article of that name). The occitan troubadours were amazingly creative in the development of verse forms and poetic genres, but their greatest impact on medieval literature was perhaps in their elaboration of complex code of love and service called "fin amors" or, more generally, courtly love
Courtly love
Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife....
. For more information on the troubadour tradition, see Provençal literature
Provençal literature
Occitan literature — still sometimes called Provençal literature — is a body of texts written in Occitan in what is nowadays the South of France. It originated in the poetry of the 11th- and 12th-century troubadours, and inspired the rise of vernacular literature throughout medieval...
.
By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic (as well as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name) tendencies are apparent in the Roman de Fauvel
Roman de Fauvel
The Roman de Fauvel, translated as The Story of the Fawn-Colored Beast, is a 14th century French poem accredited to French royal clerk Gervais du Bus, though probably best known for its musical arrangement by Philippe de Vitry in the Ars Nova style...
in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church filled with medieval motets, lai
Lai
A lai is a lyrical, narrative poem written in octosyllabic couplets that often deals with tales of adventure and romance.Lais were mainly composed in France and Germany, during the 13th and 14th centuries. A Provençal term for a similar kind of poem is descort.The English term lay is a...
s, rondeaux
Rondeau (music)
The rondeau was a Medieval and early Renaissance musical form, based on the contemporary popular poetic rondeau form. It is distinct from the 18th century rondo, though the terms are likely related...
and other new secular forms of poetry and music (mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry
Philippe de Vitry
Philippe de Vitry was a French composer, music theorist and poet. He was an accomplished, innovative, and influential composer, and may also have been the author of the Ars Nova treatise...
who would coin the expression Ars nova
Ars nova
Ars nova refers to a musical style which flourished in France and the Burgundian Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages: more particularly, in the period between the preparation of the Roman de Fauvel and the death of the composer Guillaume de Machaut in 1377...
[new art, or new technique] to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age). The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chanson
Chanson
A chanson is in general any lyric-driven French song, usually polyphonic and secular. A singer specialising in chansons is known as a "chanteur" or "chanteuse" ; a collection of chansons, especially from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, is also known as a chansonnier.-Chanson de geste:The...
s was Guillaume de Machaut
Guillaume de Machaut
Guillaume de Machaut was a Medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest composers on whom significant biographical information is available....
. (For more on music, see medieval music
Medieval music
Medieval music is Western music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends sometime in the early fifteenth century...
; for more on music in the period after Machaux, see Renaissance music
Renaissance music
Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...
).
French poetry continued to evolve in the 15th century. Charles, duc d'Orléans
Charles, duc d'Orléans
Charles of Valois was Duke of Orléans from 1407, following the murder of his father, Louis I, Duke of Orléans, on the orders of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy...
was a noble and head of one of the most powerful families in France during the Hundred Years' War
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War was a series of separate wars waged from 1337 to 1453 by the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet, also known as the House of Anjou, for the French throne, which had become vacant upon the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings...
. Captured in the Battle of Agincourt
Battle of Agincourt
The Battle of Agincourt was a major English victory against a numerically superior French army in the Hundred Years' War. The battle occurred on Friday, 25 October 1415 , near modern-day Azincourt, in northern France...
, he was a prisoner of the English from 1415–1441 and his ballades often speak of loss and isolation. Christine de Pisan was one of the most prolific writers of her age; her "Cité des Dames" is considered a kind of "feminist manifesto". François Villon
François Villon
François Villon was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison...
was a student and vagabond whose two poetic "testaments" or "wills" are celebrated for their portrayal of the urban and university environment of Paris and their scabrous wit, satire and verbal puns. The image of Villon as vagabond poet seems to have gained almost mythic status in the 16th century, and this figure would be championed by poetic rebels of the 19th century and 20th centuries (see Poète maudit
Poète maudit
A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit....
).
Renaissance
Poetry in the first years of the 16th century is characterised by the elaborate sonorous and graphic experimentation and skillful word games of a number of Northern poets (such as Jean Lemaire de BelgesJean Lemaire de Belges
Jean Lemaire de Belges was a Walloon poet and historian who lived primarily in France.He was born in Hainaut , the godson and possibly a nephew of Jean Molinet, and spent some time with him at Valenciennes, where the elder writer held a kind of academy of poetry. Lemaire in his first poems calls...
and Jean Molinet
Jean Molinet
Jean Molinet was a French poet, chronicler, and composer. He is best remembered for his prose translation of Roman de la rose.Born in Desvres, which is now part of France, he studied in Paris...
), generally called "les Grands Rhétoriqueurs
Grands Rhétoriqueurs
The Grands Rhétoriqueurs or simply the "Rhétoriqueurs" is the name given to a group of poets from 1460 to 1520 working in Northern France, Flanders and the Duchy of Burgundy whose ostentatious poetic production was dominated by an extremely rich rhyme scheme and experimentation with assonance...
" who continued to develop poetic techniques from the previous century. Soon however, the impact of Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
(the sonnet cycle
Sonnet cycle
A sonnet cycle is a group of sonnets, arranged to address a particular person or theme, and designed to be read both as a collection of fully realized individual poems and as a single poetic work comprising all the individual sonnets....
addressed to an idealised lover, the use of amorous pardoxes), Italian poets in the French court (like Luigi Alamanni
Luigi Alamanni
Luigi Alamanni was an Italian poet and statesman. He was regarded as a prolific and versatile poet. He was credited with introducing the epigram into Italian poetry.-Biography:...
), Italian Neo-platonism and humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
, and the rediscovery of certain Greek poets (such as Pindar
Pindar
Pindar , was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich...
and Anacreon) would profoundly modify the French tradition. In this respect, the French poets Clément Marot
Clément Marot
Clément Marot was a French poet of the Renaissance period.-Youth:Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot , whose more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman from the Caen...
and Mellin de Saint-Gelais
Mellin de Saint-Gelais
Mellin de Saint-Gelais was a French poet of the Renaissance and Poet Laureate of Francis I of France.- Life :...
are transitional figures: they are credited with some of the first sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
s in French, but their poems continue to employ many of the traditional forms.
The new direction of poetry is fully apparent in the work of the humanist Jacques Peletier du Mans
Jacques Peletier du Mans
Jacques Pelletier du Mans, also spelled Peletier, in Latin: Peletarius , was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance....
. In 1541, he published the first French translation of Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
's "Ars poetica" and in 1547 he published a collection poems "Œuvres poétiques", which included translations from the first two cantos of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
's Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
and the first book of Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
's Georgics
Georgics
The Georgics is a poem in four books, likely published in 29 BC. It is the second major work by the Latin poet Virgil, following his Eclogues and preceding the Aeneid. It is a poem that draws on many prior sources and influenced many later authors from antiquity to the present...
, twelve Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
ian sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
s, three Horacian
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
ode
Ode
Ode is a type of lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist...
s and a Martial-like
Martial
Marcus Valerius Martialis , was a Latin poet from Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan...
epigram
Epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....
; this poetry collection also included the first published poems of Joachim Du Bellay
Joachim du Bellay
Joachim du Bellay was a French poet, critic, and a member of the Pléiade.-Biography:He was born at the Château of La Turmelière, not far from Liré, near Angers, being the son of Jean du Bellay, Lord of Gonnor, first cousin of the cardinal Jean du Bellay and of Guillaume du Bellay.Both his parents...
and Pierre de Ronsard
Pierre de Ronsard
Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet and "prince of poets" .-Early life:...
.
Around Ronsard, Du Bellay and Jean Antoine de Baïf there formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court (generally known today as La Pléiade
La Pléiade
The Pléiade is the name given to a group of 16th-century French Renaissance poets whose principal members were Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. The name was a reference to another literary group, the original Alexandrian Pleiad of seven Alexandrian poets and...
, although use of this term is debated). The character of their literary program was given in Du Bellay's manifesto, the "Defense and Illustration of the French Language" (1549) which maintained that French (like the Tuscan of Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
and Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
) was a worthy language for literary expression and which promulgated a program of linguistic and literary production (including the imitation of Latin and Greek genres) and purification. For some of the members of the Pléiade, the act of the poetry itself was seen as a form of divine inspiration (see Pontus de Tyard
Pontus de Tyard
Pontus de Tyard was a French poet and priest, a member of "La Pléiade".He was born at Bissy-sur-Fley in Burgundy, of which he was seigneur, but the exact year of his birth is uncertain. He became a friend of Antoine Héroet and Maurice Scève...
for example), a possession by the muse
Muse
The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...
s akin to romantic passion, prophetic fervor or alcoholic delirium.
The forms that dominate the poetic production of the period are the Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
ian sonnet cycle
Sonnet cycle
A sonnet cycle is a group of sonnets, arranged to address a particular person or theme, and designed to be read both as a collection of fully realized individual poems and as a single poetic work comprising all the individual sonnets....
(developed around an amorous encounter or an idealized woman) and the Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
/Anacreon ode
Ode
Ode is a type of lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist...
(especially of the "carpe diem
Carpe diem
Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace that has become an aphorism. It is popularly translated as "seize the day"...
" - life is short, seize the day - variety). Ronsard also tried early on to adapt the Pindar
Pindar
Pindar , was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich...
ic ode into French. Throughout the period, the use of mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
is frequent, but so too is a depiction of the natural world (woods, rivers). Other genres include the paradoxical encomium
Encomium
Encomium is a Latin word deriving from the Classical Greek ἐγκώμιον meaning the praise of a person or thing. "Encomium" also refers to several distinct aspects of rhetoric:* A general category of oratory* A method within rhetorical pedagogy...
(such as Remy Belleau
Remy Belleau
Remy Belleau , was a poet of the French Renaissance. He is most known for his paradoxical poems of praise for simple things and his poems about precious stones....
's poem prasing the oyster), the "blason
Blason
Blason originally comes from the heraldic term blazon in French heraldry and means either the codified description of a coat of arms or the coat of arms itself...
" of the female body (a poetic description of a body part), and propagandistic verse.
Several poets of the period—Jean Antoine de Baïf (who founded an "Académie de Poésie et Musique" in 1570), Blaise de Vigenère
Blaise de Vigenère
Blaise de Vigenère was a French diplomat and cryptographer. The Vigenère cipher is so named due to the cipher being incorrectly attributed to him in the 19th century....
and others—attempted to adapt into French the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
or Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
poetic meters; these experiments were called "vers mesurés" and "prose mesuré" (for more, see the article "musique mesurée
Musique mesurée
Musique mesurée, or Musique mesurée à l'antique, was a style of vocal musical composition in France in the late 16th century. In musique mesurée, longer syllables in the French language were set to longer note values, and shorter syllables to shorter, in a homophonic texture but in a situation of...
").
Although the royal court was the center of much of the century's poetry, Lyon
Lyon
Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....
– the second largest city in France in the Renaissance – also had its poets and humanists, most notably Maurice Scève
Maurice Scève
Maurice Scève , French poet, was born at Lyon, where his father practised law.He was the centre of the Lyonnese côterie that elaborated the theory of spiritual love, derived partly from Plato and partly from Petrarch...
, Louise Labé
Louise Labé
Louise Labé, , also identified as La Belle Cordière, , was a female French poet of the Renaissance, born at Lyon, the daughter of a rich ropemaker, Pierre Charly, and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet...
, Olivier de Magny and Pontus de Tyard
Pontus de Tyard
Pontus de Tyard was a French poet and priest, a member of "La Pléiade".He was born at Bissy-sur-Fley in Burgundy, of which he was seigneur, but the exact year of his birth is uncertain. He became a friend of Antoine Héroet and Maurice Scève...
. Scève's Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu - composed of 449 ten syllable ten line poems (dizains) and published with numerous engraved emblem
Emblem
An emblem is a pictorial image, abstract or representational, that epitomizes a concept — e.g., a moral truth, or an allegory — or that represents a person, such as a king or saint.-Distinction: emblem and symbol:...
s - is exemplary in its use of amorous paradoxes and (often obscure) allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
to describe the suffering of a lover.
Poetry at the end of the century was profoundly marked by the civil wars
French Wars of Religion
The French Wars of Religion is the name given to a period of civil infighting and military operations, primarily fought between French Catholics and Protestants . The conflict involved the factional disputes between the aristocratic houses of France, such as the House of Bourbon and House of Guise...
: pessimism, dourness and a call for retreat from the world predominate (as in Jean de Sponde
Jean de Sponde
Jean de Sponde was a Baroque French poet.- Biography :Born at Mauléon, in what is now Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Jean de Sponde was raised in an austere Protestant family in the Basque region of France with close relations with the royal court of Navarre...
). However, the horrors of the war were also to inspire one Protestant poet, Agrippa d'Aubigné
Agrippa d'Aubigné
Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné was a French poet, soldier, propagandist and chronicler. His epic poem Les Tragiques is widely regarded as his masterpiece.-Life:...
, to write a brilliant poem on the conflict:Les Tragiques.
Classical French poetry
Because of the new conception of "l'honnête homme" or "the honest or upright man", poetry became one of the principal modes of literary production of noble gentlemen and of non-noble professional writers in their patronage in the 17th century.Poetry was used for all purposes. A great deal of 17th- and 18th-century poetry was "occasional", written to celebrate a particular event
Occasional poetry
Occasional poetry is poetry composed for a particular occasion. In the history of literature, it is often studied in connection with orality, performance, and patronage. As a term of literary criticism, "occasional poetry" describes the work's purpose and the poet's relation to subject matter...
(a marriage, birth, military victory) or to solemnize a tragic occurrence (a death, military defeat), and this kind of poetry was frequent with gentlemen in the service of a noble or the king. Poetry was the chief form of 17th century theater: the vast majority of scripted plays were written in verse (see "Theater" below). Poetry was used in satires (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was a French poet and critic.-Biography:Boileau was born in the rue de Jérusalem, in Paris, France. He was brought up to the law, but devoted to letters, associating himself with La Fontaine, Racine, and Molière...
is famous for his "Satires" (1666)) and in epics (inspired by the Renaissance epic tradition and by Tasso
Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
) like Jean Chapelain
Jean Chapelain
Jean Chapelain was a French poet and writer.-Biography:Chapelain was born in Paris. His father wanted him to become a notary; but his mother, who had known Pierre de Ronsard, had decided otherwise...
's La Pucelle.
Although French poetry during the reign of Henri IV and Louis XIII was still largely inspired by the poets of the late Valois court
Valois Dynasty
The House of Valois was a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty, succeeding the House of Capet as kings of France from 1328 to 1589...
, some of their excesses and poetic liberties found censure, especially in the work of François de Malherbe
François de Malherbe
François de Malherbe was a French poet, critic, and translator.-Life:Born in Le-Locheur , his family was of some position, though it seems not to have been able to establish to the satisfaction of heralds the claims which it made to nobility older than the 16th century.He was the eldest son of...
who criticized La Pléiade
La Pléiade
The Pléiade is the name given to a group of 16th-century French Renaissance poets whose principal members were Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. The name was a reference to another literary group, the original Alexandrian Pleiad of seven Alexandrian poets and...
's and Philippe Desportes
Philippe Desportes
Philippe Desportes was a French poet.-Biography:Philippe Desportes was born in Chartres. While serving as secretary to the bishop of Le Puy he visited Italy, where he learned Italian poetry. This experience became a good account. On his return to France he attached himself to the duke of Anjou,...
's irregularities of meter or form (the suppression of the cesura by a hiatus
Hiatus (linguistics)
In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....
, sentences clauses spilling over into the next line "enjambement", neologisms constructed from Greek words, etc.). The later 17th century would see Malherbe as the grandfather of poetic classicism.
Poetry came to be a part of the social games in noble salons (see "salons" above), where epigrams, satirical verse, and poetic descriptions were all common (the most famous example is "La Guirlande de Julie" (1641) at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a collection of floral poems written by the salon members for the birthday of the host's daughter). The linguistic aspects of the phenomenon associated with the "précieuses
Précieuses
The French literary style called préciosité arose in the 17th century from the lively conversations and playful word games of les précieuses , the witty and educated intellectual ladies who frequented the salon of Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet; her Chambre bleue offered a...
" (similar to Euphuism
Euphuism
Euphuism is a peculiar mannered style of English prose. It takes its name from a prose romance by John Lyly. It consists of a preciously ornate and sophisticated style, employing in deliberate excess a wide range of literary devices such as antitheses, alliterations, repetitions and rhetorical...
in England, Gongorism
Luis de Góngora
Luis de Góngora y Argote was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet. Góngora and his lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo, are widely considered to be the most prominent Spanish poets of their age. His style is characterized by what was called culteranismo, also known as Gongorism...
in Spain and Marinism in Italy) -- the use of highly metaphorical (sometimes obscure) language, the purification of socially unacceptable vocabulary—was tied to this poetic salon spirit and would have an enormous impact on French poetic and courtly language. Although "préciosité" was often mocked (especially in the later 1660s when the phenomenon had spread to the provinces) for its linguistic and romantic excesses (often linked to a misogynistic disdain for intellectual women), the French language and social manners of the 17th century were permanently changed by it.
From the 1660s, three poets stand out. Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional...
gained enormous celebrity through his Aesop
Aesop
Aesop was a Greek writer credited with a number of popular fables. Older spellings of his name have included Esop and Isope. Although his existence remains uncertain and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a...
inspired "Fables" (1668–1693) which were written in an irregular verse form (different meter lengths are used in a poem). Jean Racine
Jean Racine
Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
was seen as the greatest tragedy writer of his age. Finally, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was a French poet and critic.-Biography:Boileau was born in the rue de Jérusalem, in Paris, France. He was brought up to the law, but devoted to letters, associating himself with La Fontaine, Racine, and Molière...
became the theorizer of poetic classicism: his "Art poétique" (1674) praised reason and logic (Boileau elevated Malherbe as the first of the rational poets), believability, moral usefulness and moral correctness; it elevated tragedy and the poetic epic as the great genres and recommended imitation of the poets of antiquity.
"Classicism" in poetry would dominate until the pre-romantics and the French Revolution.
From a technical point of view, the poetic production from the late 17th century on increasingly relied on stanza forms incorporating rhymed couplets, and by the 18th century fixed-form poems – and, in particular, the sonnet – were largely avoided. The resulting versification – less constrained by meter and rhyme patterns than Renaissance poetry – more closely mirrored prose.
Nineteenth-century
French poetry from the first half of the century was dominated by RomanticismRomanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, associated with such authors as Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, Alphonse de Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine
Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French writer, poet and politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic.-Career:...
, and Gérard de Nerval
Gérard de Nerval
Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...
. The effect of the romantic movement would continue to be felt in the latter half of the century in wildly diverse literary developments, such as "realism", "symbolism", and the so-called fin de siècle "decadent" movement
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
(see below). Victor Hugo was the outstanding genius of the Romantic School and its recognized leader. He was prolific alike in poetry, drama, and fiction. Other writers associated with the movement were the austere and pessimistic Alfred de Vigny
Alfred de Vigny
Alfred Victor de Vigny was a French poet, playwright, and novelist.-Life:Alfred de Vigny was born in Loches into an aristocratic family...
, Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
a devotee of beauty and creator of the "Art for art's sake
Art for art's sake
"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
" movement, and Alfred de Musset
Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle from 1836.-Biography:Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris...
, who best exemplifies romantic melancholy.
By the middle of the century, an attempt to be objective was made in poetry by the group of writers known as the Parnassians -- which included Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville
Théodore de Banville
Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer.-Biography:Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the...
, Catulle Mendès
Catulle Mendès
Catulle Mendès was a French poet and man of letters.Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, he was born in Bordeaux. He early established himself in Paris and promptly attained notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's...
, Sully-Prudhomme, François Coppée
François Coppée
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...
, José María de Heredia
José María de Heredia
José-Maria de Heredia was a Cuban-born French poet. He was the fifteenth member elected for seat 4 of the Académie française during 1894.-Early years:...
and (early in his career) Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
-- who (using Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
's notion of art for art's sake
Art for art's sake
"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
and the pursuit of the beautiful) strove for exact and faultless workmanship, and selected exotic and classical subjects which they treated with a rigidity of form and an emotional detachment (elements of which echo the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
whose aesthetic theories
Schopenhauer's aesthetics
Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics result from his doctrine of the primacy of the Will as the thing in itself, the ground of life and all being; and from his judgment that the Will is evil. Schopenhauer held that art offers a way for people to temporarily escape the suffering that results from willing...
would also have an influence on the symbolists).
The naturalist tendency to see life without illusions and to dwell on its more depressing and sordid aspects appears in an intensified degree in the immensely influential poetry of Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
, but with profoundly romantic elements derived from the Byronic myth of the anti-hero and the romantic poet
The poetry of Baudelaire and much of the literature in the latter half of the century (or "fin de siècle
Fin de siècle
Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...
") were often characterized as "decadent" for their lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
used the expression "poète maudit
Poète maudit
A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit....
" ("accursed poet") in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Tristan Corbière
Tristan Corbière
Tristan Corbière , born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life and where he died....
, Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
and Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or had been ignored by the critics. But with the publication of Jean Moréas
Jean Moréas
Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...
"Symbolist Manifesto" in 1886, it was the term symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
which was most often applied to the new literary environment.
The writers Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
, Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
, Joris-Karl Huysmans
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...
, Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
, Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...
, Jean Moréas
Jean Moréas
Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...
, Gustave Kahn
Gustave Kahn
Gustave Kahn was a French Symbolist poet and art critic.Kahn was born in Metz.He claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse; he was in any case one of the first European exponents of the form. His principal publications include Les Palais nomades, 1887, Domaine de fée, 1895, and...
, Albert Samain
Albert Samain
Albert Victor Samain was a French poet and writer of the Symbolist school.Born in Lille, his family were Flemish and had long lived in the town or its suburbs. At the time of the poet's birth, his father, Jean-Baptiste Samain, and his mother, Elisa-Henriette Mouquet, conducted a business in "wines...
, Jean Lorrain
Jean Lorrain
Jean Lorrain , born Paul Duval, was a French poet and novelist of the Symbolist school....
, Rémy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars...
, Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who "expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection."-Life:...
, Tristan Corbière
Tristan Corbière
Tristan Corbière , born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life and where he died....
, Henri de Régnier
Henri de Régnier
Henri François Joseph de Régnier was a French symbolist poet, considered one of the most important of France during the early 20th century....
, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Stuart Merrill
Stuart Merrill
Stuart Fitzrandolph Merrill was an American poet, born in Hempstead, New York, who wrote mostly in the French language. He belonged to the Symbolist school. His principal books of poetry were Les Gammes . Les Fastes , and Petits Poèmes d'Automne .-Life:Merrill was the product of a conservative,...
, René Ghil, Saint-Pol Roux, Oscar-Vladislas de Milosz
Oscar Milosz
Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a French-Lithuanian writer and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. His literary work was concerned with symbols and associations. A recluse, his poems were vibrant and tormented, concerned with love, loneliness and anger. Milosz was primarily...
, the Belgians Albert Giraud
Albert Giraud
Albert Giraud , was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.-Biography:Giraud was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Louvain. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry...
, Emile Verhaeren
Emile Verhaeren
Emile Verhaeren was a Belgian poet who wrote in the French language, and one of the chief founders of the school of Symbolism....
, Georges Rodenbach
Georges Rodenbach
Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.- Biography :Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland . He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet...
and Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
and others have been called symbolists, although each author's personal literary project was unique.
From a technical point of view, the Romantics were responsible for a return to (and sometimes a modification of) many of the fixed-form poems used during the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as for the creation of new forms. The sonnet however was little used until the Parnassians brought it back into favor, and the sonnet would subsequently find its most significant practitioner in Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
. The traditional French sonnet form was however significantly modified by Baudelaire, who used 32 different forms of sonnet with non-traditional rhyme patterns to great effect in his Les Fleurs du mal
Les Fleurs du mal
Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857 , it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements...
.
Twentieth-century
Guillaume ApollinaireGuillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
radicalized the Baudelairian poetic exploration of modern life in evoking planes, the Eiffel Tower and urban wastelands, and he brought poetry into contact with cubism through his "Calligrammes
Calligrammes
Calligrammes, subtitled Poems of war and peace 1913-1916, is a collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, and was first published in 1918 . Calligrammes is noted for how the typeface and spatial arrangement of the words on a page plays just as much of a role in the meaning of each poem as the...
", a form of visual poetry
Visual poetry
Visual poetry is poetry or art in which the visual arrangement of text, images and symbols is important in conveying the intended effect of the work. It is sometimes referred to as concrete poetry, a term that predates visual poetry, and at one time was synonymous with it.Visual poetry was heavily...
. Inspired by Rimbaud, Paul Claudel
Paul Claudel
Paul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism.-Life:...
used a form of free verse to explore his mystical conversion to Catholicism. Other poets from this period include: Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
, Max Jacob
Max Jacob
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
(a key member of the group around Apollinaire), Pierre Jean Jouve
Pierre Jean Jouve
Pierre Jean Jouve was a French writer, novelist and poet. No more info at the moment.-References:...
(a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism"), Valery Larbaud
Valery Larbaud
Valery Larbaud was a French writer.-Life:He was born in Vichy, Allier, the only child of a pharmacist. His father died when he was 8, and he was brought up by his mother and aunt. His father had been owner of the Vichy Saint-Yorre mineral water springs, and the family fortune assured him an easy...
(a translator of Whitman and friend to Joyce), Victor Segalen
Victor Segalen
Victor Segalen was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic....
(friend to Huysmans and Claudel), Léon-Paul Fargue
Léon-Paul Fargue
Léon-Paul Fargue was a French poet and essayist.He was born in Paris, France on rue Coquilliére. As a poet he was noted for his poetry of atmosphere and detail. His work spanned numerous literary movements...
(who studied with Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
and was close to Valéry and Larbaud).
The First World War generated even more radical tendencies. The Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
movement—which began in a café in Switzerland in 1916—came to Paris in 1920, but by 1924 the writers around Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
, Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
and Robert Desnos
Robert Desnos
Robert Desnos , was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.- Biography :...
-- heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
's notion of the unconscious
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
-- had modified dada provocation into Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. In writing and in the visual arts, and by using automatic writing
Automatic writing
Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
, creative games (like the cadavre exquis) and altered states (through alcohol and narcotics), the surrealists tried to reveal the workings of the unconscious mind. The group championed previous writers they saw as radical (Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
, the Comte de Lautréamont
Comte de Lautréamont
Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse , an Uruguayan-born French poet....
, Baudelaire) and promoted an anti-bourgeois philosophy (particularly with regards to sex and politics) which would later lead most of them to join the communist party. Other writers associated with surrealism include: Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
, René Crevel
René Crevel
René Crevel was a French writer involved with the surrealist movement.-Life:Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Crevel...
, Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain very popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. Some of the movies he wrote are extremely well regarded, with Les Enfants du Paradis considered one of the greatest films of all time.-Life and...
, Jules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle was a French poet and writer born in Uruguay.Jules Supervielle always kept away from Surrealism which was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century...
, Benjamin Péret
Benjamin Péret
Benjamin Péret was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism.-Biography:...
, Philippe Soupault
Philippe Soupault
Philippe Soupault was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was active in Dadaism and later founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton...
, Pierre Reverdy
Pierre Reverdy
Pierre Reverdy was a French poet associated with surrealism and cubism.Pierre Reverdy was born in Narbonne and grew up near the Montagne Noire in his father's house. Reverdy came from a family of sculptors. His father taught him to read and write. He studied at Toulouse and Narbonne.Reverdy...
, Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
(who revolutionized theater), Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism...
and René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
. The surrealist movement would continue to be a major force in experimental writing and the international art world until the Second World War.
The effects of surrealism would later also be felt among authors who were not strictly speaking part of the movement, such as the poet Alexis Saint-Léger Léger (who wrote under the name Saint-John Perse
Saint-John Perse
Saint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...
), the poet Edmond Jabès
Edmond Jabes
----Edmond Jabès was a Jewish writer and poet, and one of the best known literary figures to write in French after World War II.- Life :...
(who came to France in 1956 when the Jewish population was expelled from his native Egypt) and Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
. The Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.-Early years:...
was close to Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and the artists Chagall and Léger, and his work has similarities with both surrealism and cubism.
Poetry in the post-war period followed a number of interlinked paths, most notably deriving from surrealism (such as with the early work of René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
), or from philosophical and phenomenological concerns stemming from Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his...
, existentialism, the relationship between poetry and the visual arts, and Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
's notions of the limits of language. Another important influence was the German poet Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
. Poets concerned with these philosophical/language concerns—especially concentrated around the review "L'Ephémère" -- include Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher....
, André du Bouchet
André du Bouchet
André du Bouchet was a French poet.- Biography :Born in Paris, he lived in France until 1941, when his family left occupied Europe for the United States. He studied at Amherst College and then at Harvard University . After teaching for a year, he returned to France...
, Jacques Dupin
Jacques Dupin
Jacques Dupin is a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal L'éphemère.A resident of Paris since 1944, he is director of publication at Galerie Maeght.- Jacques Dupin's poetry in English :...
, Roger Giroux
Roger Giroux
Roger Giroux was a French poet. Giroux's one book was awarded the Prix Max Jacob award. Translator of W.B. Yeats, Lawrence Durrell, and others. A sample of his poems is included in , edited by Paul Auster, and generally recognized as the best anthology of Modern French poetry in English...
and Philippe Jaccottet
Philippe Jaccottet
Philippe Jaccottet is a poet and translator who publishes in French.After completing his studies in Lausanne, he lived several years in Paris. In 1953, came to live in the town of Grignan in Provence...
. Many of these ideas were also key to the works of Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
. The unique poetry of Francis Ponge
Francis Ponge
Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
exerted a strong influence on a variety of writers (both phenomenologists and those from the group "Tel Quel
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
"). The later poets Claude Royet-Journoud
Claude Royet-Journoud
Claude Royet-Journoud is a contemporary French poet and artist living in Paris .-Overview:Royet-Journoud's publications in French include his tetralogy, published between 1972 and 1997: Le Renversement, La Notion d'Obstacle, Les Objets contiennent l'infini, and Les Natures indivisibles...
, Anne-Marie Albiach
Anne-Marie Albiach
Anne-Marie Albiach is a contemporary French poet and translator.-Overview:Anne-Marie Albiach's poetry is characterized by, among other things, an inventive use of spacing on the printed page...
, Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard is a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui and 49+1...
, and to a degree Jean Daive
Jean Daive
Jean Daive is a poet and translator. He is the author of novels, collections of poetry and has translated work by Paul Celan and Robert Creeley among others....
, describe a shift from Heidegger to Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
and a reevaluation of Mallarmé's notion of fiction and theatricality; these poets were also influenced by certain English-language modern poets (such as Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, and George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
) along with certain American postmodern and avant garde poets loosely grouped around the language poetry movement.
Middle Ages
(includes both trouvèreTrouvère
Trouvère , sometimes spelled trouveur , is the Northern French form of the word trobador . It refers to poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France...
s and troubadour
Troubadour
A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
s)
- Arnaut DanielArnaut DanielArnaut Daniel de Riberac was an Occitan troubadour of the 12th century, praised by Dante as "il miglior fabbro" and called "Grand Master of Love" by Petrarch...
- Bernart de VentadornBernart de VentadornBernart de Ventadorn , also known as Bernard de Ventadour or Bernat del Ventadorn, was a prominent troubador of the classical age of troubadour poetry. Now thought of as "the Master Singer" he developed the cançons into a more formalized style which allowed for sudden turns...
- Bertran de BornBertran de BornBertran de Born was a baron from the Limousin in France, and one of the major Occitan troubadours of the twelfth century.-Life and works:...
- Folquet de MarselhaFolquet de MarselhaFolquet de Marselha, alternatively Folquet de Marseille, Foulques de Toulouse, Fulk of Toulouse came from a Genoese merchant family who lived in Marseille...
(Foulques de Toulouse) - Gautier d'Espinal
- Gui d'UsselGui d'UsselGui d'Ussel, d'Ussèl, or d'Uisel was a turn-of-the-thirteenth-century troubadour of the Limousin. Twenty of his poems survive: eight cansos, two pastorelas, two coblas, and eight tensos, several with his relatives and including a partimen with Maria de Ventadorn...
- William IX of AquitaineWilliam IX of AquitaineWilliam IX , called the Troubador, was the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and Count of Poitou between 1086 and his death. He was also one of the leaders of the Crusade of 1101...
- Guillem de CabestanyGuillem de CabestanyGuillem de Cabestany was a Catalan troubadour from Cabestany in the County of Roussillon. His name in Occitan is Guilhem de Cabestaing, Cabestang, Cabestan, or Cabestanh; in modern Occitan it is spelled Guilhèm....
- Guiraut de Bornelh
- Guiraut RiquierGuiraut RiquierGuiraut Riquier is among the last of the Provençal troubadours. He is well known because of his great care in writing out his works and keeping them together—the New Grove Encyclopedia considers him an "anthologist" of his own works....
- Jaufré RudelJaufré RudelJaufre Rudel was the Prince of Blaye and a troubadour of the early–mid 12th century, who probably died during the Second Crusade, in or after 1147...
- Macabru
- Peire VidalPeire VidalPeire Vidal was a troubadour. According to his biography, he was born in Toulouse, the son of a furrier, and the greatest of singers....
- Raimbaut de VaqueirasRaimbaut de VaqueirasRaimbaut de Vaqueiras was a Provençal troubadour and, later in his life, knight. His life was spent mainly in Italian courts until 1203, when he joined the Fourth Crusade....
- Raimbaut of OrangeRaimbaut of OrangeRaimbaut of Orange , or in Occitan Raimbaut d'Aurenga, was the lord of Orange and Aumelas. His properties included the towns of Frontignan and Mireval. He was the only son of William of Aumelas and of Tiburge, daughter of Raimbaut, count of Orange...
- Chrétien de TroyesChrétien de TroyesChrétien de Troyes was a French poet and trouvère who flourished in the late 12th century. Perhaps he named himself Christian of Troyes in contrast to the illustrious Rashi, also of Troyes...
(fl. 1160s-80s) - Adenet Le Roi (c.1240–c.1300)
- Blondel de Nesle (fl c.1175–1210)
- Chastelain de CouciLe Châtelain de CoucyLe Chastelain de Couci was a French trouvère of the 12th century. He may have been the Guy de Couci who was castellan of Château de Coucy from 1186 to 1203....
(fl c.1170–1203; †1203) - Colin MusetColin MusetColin Muset was an Old French trouvère and a native of Lorraine. He made his living in the Champagne by travelling from castle to castle singing songs of his own composition and playing the vielle. These are not confined to the praise of courtly love that formed the usual topic of the trouvères,...
(fl c.1230–60) - Conon de BéthuneConon de BéthuneConon de Béthune was a crusader and "trouvère" poet.-Life:...
(fl c.1180–c.1220; †1220) - Gace BruléGace BruléGace Brulé , French trouvère, was a native of Champagne.His name is simply a description of his Blazonry. He owned land in Groslière and had dealings with the Knights Templar, and received a gift from the future Louis VIII. These facts are known from documents from the time...
(c.1159-after 1212) - Gautier de CoincyGautier de CoincyGautier de Coincy was a French abbot, poet and musical arranger, chiefly known for his devotion to the Virgin Mary.While he served as prior of Vic-sur-Aisne he compiled Les Miracles de Nostre-Dame in which he set poems in praise of the Virgin Mary to popular melodies and songs of his...
(1177/8–1236) - Guiot de DijonGuiot de DijonGuiot de Dijon was a Burgundian trouvère. The seventeen chansons ascribed to him are found in two chansonniers: the Chansonnier du Roi and the less reliable Berne Chansonnier...
(fl c.1200–30) - Thibaut IV of ChampagneTheobald I of NavarreTheobald I , called the Troubadour, the Chansonnier, and the Posthumous, was Count of Champagne from birth and King of Navarre from 1234...
(1201–53) - Adam de la HalleAdam de la HalleAdam de la Halle, also known as Adam le Bossu was a French-born trouvère, poet and musician, whose literary and musical works include chansons and jeux-partis in the style of the trouveres, polyphonic rondel and motets in the style of early liturgical polyphony, and a musical play, "The Play of...
(c.1240–88) - Audefroi le BastartAudefroi le BatardAudefroi le Bastart was a French trouvère from Artois, who flourished in the early thirteenth century.Of his life nothing is known, though he is certainly the illegitimate child of a noble or upper-class bourgeouis family, but his family is not to be identified with the noble family Arras or with...
(fl c1200–1230) - Moniot d'ArrasMoniot d'ArrasMoniot d'Arras was a French composer and poet of the trouvère tradition. He was a monk of the abbey of Arras in northern France; the area was at the time a center of trouvère activity, and his contemporaries included Adam de la Halle and Colin Muset. His songs were all monophonic in the tradition...
(fl c1250–75) - RutebeufRutebeufRutebeuf , a trouvère, was born in the first half of the 13th century, possibly in Champagne ; he was evidently of humble birth, and he was a Parisian by education and residence. His name is nowhere mentioned by his contemporaries...
(d.1285) - Guillaume de MachautGuillaume de MachautGuillaume de Machaut was a Medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest composers on whom significant biographical information is available....
(1300–1377) - Eustache DeschampsEustache DeschampsEustache Deschamps was a medieval French poet, also known as Eustache Morel . Born at Vertus, in Champagne, he received lessons in versification from Guillaume de Machaut and later studied law at Orleans University. He then traveled through Europe as a diplomatic messenger for Charles V...
(1346-c.1406) - Christine de Pisan (1364–1430)
- Charles, duc d'OrléansCharles, duc d'OrléansCharles of Valois was Duke of Orléans from 1407, following the murder of his father, Louis I, Duke of Orléans, on the orders of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy...
(1394–1465) - François VillonFrançois VillonFrançois Villon was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison...
(1431-1465?)
Sixteenth century
- Jean Lemaire de BelgesJean Lemaire de BelgesJean Lemaire de Belges was a Walloon poet and historian who lived primarily in France.He was born in Hainaut , the godson and possibly a nephew of Jean Molinet, and spent some time with him at Valenciennes, where the elder writer held a kind of academy of poetry. Lemaire in his first poems calls...
- Jean MolinetJean MolinetJean Molinet was a French poet, chronicler, and composer. He is best remembered for his prose translation of Roman de la rose.Born in Desvres, which is now part of France, he studied in Paris...
- Clément MarotClément MarotClément Marot was a French poet of the Renaissance period.-Youth:Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot , whose more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman from the Caen...
- Maurice ScèveMaurice ScèveMaurice Scève , French poet, was born at Lyon, where his father practised law.He was the centre of the Lyonnese côterie that elaborated the theory of spiritual love, derived partly from Plato and partly from Petrarch...
- Pernette Du GuilletPernette Du GuilletPernette Du Guillet was a female French poet of the Renaissance.She was born in a noble family and married in 1537 or 1538 a man with the last name Du Guillet. In the spring of 1536, she met the poet Maurice Scève , and she would serve as Scève's poetic muse, inspiring his Délie...
- Jacques Peletier du MansJacques Peletier du MansJacques Pelletier du Mans, also spelled Peletier, in Latin: Peletarius , was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance....
- Mellin de Saint-GelaisMellin de Saint-GelaisMellin de Saint-Gelais was a French poet of the Renaissance and Poet Laureate of Francis I of France.- Life :...
- Joachim du BellayJoachim du BellayJoachim du Bellay was a French poet, critic, and a member of the Pléiade.-Biography:He was born at the Château of La Turmelière, not far from Liré, near Angers, being the son of Jean du Bellay, Lord of Gonnor, first cousin of the cardinal Jean du Bellay and of Guillaume du Bellay.Both his parents...
- Pierre de RonsardPierre de RonsardPierre de Ronsard was a French poet and "prince of poets" .-Early life:...
- Pontus de TyardPontus de TyardPontus de Tyard was a French poet and priest, a member of "La Pléiade".He was born at Bissy-sur-Fley in Burgundy, of which he was seigneur, but the exact year of his birth is uncertain. He became a friend of Antoine Héroet and Maurice Scève...
- Jean Antoine de Baïf
- Louise LabéLouise LabéLouise Labé, , also identified as La Belle Cordière, , was a female French poet of the Renaissance, born at Lyon, the daughter of a rich ropemaker, Pierre Charly, and his second wife, Etiennette Roybet...
- Jean Antoine de Baïf
- Remy BelleauRemy BelleauRemy Belleau , was a poet of the French Renaissance. He is most known for his paradoxical poems of praise for simple things and his poems about precious stones....
- Etienne de La BoétieÉtienne de La BoétieÉtienne de La Boétie was a French judge, writer, anarchist, and "a founder of modern political philosophy in France." He "has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most notable friendships."-Life:"La Boétie was born in...
- Philippe DesportesPhilippe DesportesPhilippe Desportes was a French poet.-Biography:Philippe Desportes was born in Chartres. While serving as secretary to the bishop of Le Puy he visited Italy, where he learned Italian poetry. This experience became a good account. On his return to France he attached himself to the duke of Anjou,...
- Étienne JodelleÉtienne JodelleÉtienne Jodelle, seigneur de Limodin , French dramatist and poet, was born in Paris of a noble family.He attached himself to the poetic circle of the Pléiade and proceeded to apply the principles of the reformers to dramatic composition...
- Agrippa d'AubignéAgrippa d'AubignéThéodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné was a French poet, soldier, propagandist and chronicler. His epic poem Les Tragiques is widely regarded as his masterpiece.-Life:...
- Nicolas RapinNicolas RapinNicolas Rapin was a French Renaissance magistrate, royal officer, translator, poet and satirist, known for being one of the authors of the Satire Ménippée and an outspoken critic of the excesses of the Holy League during the Wars of Religion.- Life :Born at Fontenay-le-Comte, Vendée into a family...
- Guillaume de Salluste Du BartasGuillaume de Salluste Du BartasGuillaume de Salluste Du Bartas was a French poet. A Huguenot, he served under Henry of Navarre. He is known as an epic poet. La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde was a hugely influential hexameral work, relating the creation of the world and the history of man...
- Jean de SpondeJean de SpondeJean de Sponde was a Baroque French poet.- Biography :Born at Mauléon, in what is now Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Jean de Sponde was raised in an austere Protestant family in the Basque region of France with close relations with the royal court of Navarre...
- Frédéric Lamperouge
- Jean-Baptiste Chassignet
- Marc de Papillon
Seventeenth century
- François de MalherbeFrançois de MalherbeFrançois de Malherbe was a French poet, critic, and translator.-Life:Born in Le-Locheur , his family was of some position, though it seems not to have been able to establish to the satisfaction of heralds the claims which it made to nobility older than the 16th century.He was the eldest son of...
(1555–1628) - Honoré d'UrféHonoré d'UrféHonoré d'Urfé, marquis de Valromey, comte de Châteauneuf was a French novelist and miscellaneous writer.- Life :...
(1567–1625) - Jean Ogier de Gombaud (1570?-1666)
- Mathurin RégnierMathurin RégnierMathurin Régnier was a French satirist.-Life:Régnier was born in Chartres, current region of Centre....
(1573–1613) - nephew of Philippe DesportesPhilippe DesportesPhilippe Desportes was a French poet.-Biography:Philippe Desportes was born in Chartres. While serving as secretary to the bishop of Le Puy he visited Italy, where he learned Italian poetry. This experience became a good account. On his return to France he attached himself to the duke of Anjou,... - François de Maynard (1582–1646)
- Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan (1589–1670)
- Théophile de ViauThéophile de ViauThéophile de Viau was a French Baroque poet and dramatist.Born at Clairac, near Agen in the Lot-et-Garonne and raised as a Huguenot, Théophile de Viau participated in the Protestant wars in Guyenne from 1615-1616 in the service of the Comte de Candale. After the war, he was pardoned and became a...
(1590–1626) - François le Métel de BoisrobertFrançois le Métel de BoisrobertFrançois le Métel de Boisrobert was a French poet.-Biography:He was born at Caen, and trained as a lawyer, practising for some time at the bar at Rouen. About 1622 he went to Paris, and by the next year had established a footing at court, for he had a share in the ballet of the Bacchanales...
(1592–1662) - Antoine Gérard de Saint-AmantAntoine Gérard de Saint-AmantAntoine Girard, sieur de Saint-Amant , French poet, was born near Rouen.His father was a merchant who had, according to his son's account, been a sailor and had commanded for 22 years "une escadre de la reine Elizabeth"--a vague statement that lacks confirmation...
(1594–1661) - Jean ChapelainJean ChapelainJean Chapelain was a French poet and writer.-Biography:Chapelain was born in Paris. His father wanted him to become a notary; but his mother, who had known Pierre de Ronsard, had decided otherwise...
(1595–1674) - Vincent VoitureVincent VoitureVincent Voiture , French poet, was the son of a rich merchant of Amiens. He was introduced by a schoolfellow, the count Claude d'Avaux, to Gaston, Duke of Orléans, and accompanied him to Brussels and Lorraine on diplomatic missions.Although a follower of Gaston, he won the favour of Cardinal...
(1597–1648) - Tristan L'HermiteTristan l'HermiteSee also François Tristan l'HermiteTristan l'Hermite was a French political and military figure of the late Middle Ages.He was provost of the marshals of the King's household under Louis XI of France, which gave him enormous power in the Intrigues and plots that characterized that king's 22-year...
(1601?-1655) - Pierre CorneillePierre CorneillePierre Corneille was a French tragedian who was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine...
(1606–1684) - Paul ScarronPaul ScarronPaul Scarron was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist. His precise birthdate is unknown, but he was baptized on July 4, 1610...
(1610–1660) - Isaac de BenseradeIsaac de BenseradeIsaac de Benserade was a French poet.Born in Lyons-la-Forêt in the Province of Normandy, his family appears to have been connected with Richelieu, who bestowed on him a pension of 600 livres. He began his literary career with the tragedy of Cléopâtre , which was followed by four other pieces...
(1613–1691) - Georges de BrébeufGeorges de BrébeufGeorges de Brébeuf was a French poet and translator best known for his verse translation of Lucan's Pharsalia which was warmly received by Pierre Corneille, but which was ridiculed by Nicolas Boileau in his Art poétique....
(1618–1661) - Jean de La FontaineJean de La FontaineJean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional...
(1621–1695) - Nicolas Boileau-DespréauxNicolas Boileau-DespréauxNicolas Boileau-Despréaux was a French poet and critic.-Biography:Boileau was born in the rue de Jérusalem, in Paris, France. He was brought up to the law, but devoted to letters, associating himself with La Fontaine, Racine, and Molière...
(1636–1711) - Jean RacineJean RacineJean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
(1639–1699) - Guillaume Amfrye de ChaulieuGuillaume Amfrye de ChaulieuGuillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu , French poet and wit, was born at Fontenay, Normandy.His father, maître des comptes of Rouen, sent him to study at the Collège de Navarre. Guillaume early showed the wit that was to distinguish him, and gained the favor of the duke of Vendôme, who procured for him the...
(1639–1720) - Jean-François RegnardJean-François RegnardJean-François Regnard , "the most distinguished, after Molière, of the comic poets of the seventeenth century", was a dramatist, born in Paris, who is equally famous now for the travel diary he kept of a voyage in 1681....
(1655–1709)
Nineteenth century
- Victor HugoVictor HugoVictor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
(1802–1885) is generally recognised as the greatest figure in French RomanticismRomanticismRomanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
in the 19th century. - Alphonse de LamartineAlphonse de LamartineAlphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French writer, poet and politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic.-Career:...
- Alfred de VignyAlfred de VignyAlfred Victor de Vigny was a French poet, playwright, and novelist.-Life:Alfred de Vigny was born in Loches into an aristocratic family...
- Alfred de MussetAlfred de MussetAlfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle from 1836.-Biography:Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris...
- Gérard de NervalGérard de NervalGérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...
(1808–1855) - Théophile GautierThéophile GautierPierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
(1811–1872) - Leconte de Lisle
- Théodore de BanvilleThéodore de BanvilleThéodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer.-Biography:Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the...
- Catulle MendèsCatulle MendèsCatulle Mendès was a French poet and man of letters.Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, he was born in Bordeaux. He early established himself in Paris and promptly attained notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's...
- Sully-Prudhomme
- François CoppéeFrançois CoppéeFrançois Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...
- José María de HerediaJosé María de HerediaJosé-Maria de Heredia was a Cuban-born French poet. He was the fifteenth member elected for seat 4 of the Académie française during 1894.-Early years:...
- Antoinette Henriette Clémence RobertAntoinette Henriette Clémence Robert-External links:...
- Charles BaudelaireCharles BaudelaireCharles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
(1821–1867) With Stéphane MallarméStéphane MallarméStéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
and Paul VerlainePaul VerlainePaul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
, the founder of the DecadentsDecadenceDecadence can refer to a personal trait, or to the state of a society . Used to describe a person's lifestyle. Concise Oxford Dictionary: "a luxurious self-indulgence"...
. He also founded the journal Le Salut Public, translated Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, and was prosecuted along with the publisher and printer for blasphemyBlasphemyBlasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...
associated with Les Fleurs du malLes Fleurs du malLes Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857 , it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements...
. He held salonSalon (gathering)A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
s to encourage such painters as DelacroixEugène DelacroixFerdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
. Among other poetic forms, he used the pantoumPantoumThe pantoum is a form of poetry similar to a villanelle in that there are repeating lines throughout the poem. It is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next. This pattern continues for any number of stanzas,...
. - Theodore AubanelThéodore AubanelThéodore Aubanel was a Provençal poet. He was born in Avignon in a family of painters.Aubanel started writing poetry in French but quickly switched to Provençal, due to the influence of Joseph Roumanille....
(1829–1882) Born into a publishing family (the museum for the publishing house still exists), he is the author of three collections of poetry written in the troubadour tradition, as well as three plays. - Frédéric MistralFrédéric MistralFrédéric Mistral was a French writer and lexicographer of the Occitan language. Mistral won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1904 and was a founding member of Félibrige and a member of l'Académie de Marseille...
(1830–1914) Provençal languageProvençal languageProvençal is a dialect of Occitan spoken by a minority of people in southern France, mostly in Provence. In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but it actually refers specifically to the dialect spoken in Provence."Provençal" is also the...
poet and Nobel Prize in LiteratureNobel Prize in LiteratureSince 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
laureate in 1904. He created the FélibrigeFélibrigeThe Félibrige is a literary and cultural association founded by Frédéric Mistral and other Provençal writers to defend and promote Occitan language and literature...
movement on May 21, 1854, with Théodore Aubanel, Jean Brunet, Anselme Mathieu, Paul Piera, his teacher Joseph RoumanilleJoseph RoumanilleJoseph Roumanille was a Provençal poet. He was born at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence , and is commonly known in southern France as the father of the Félibrige, for he first conceived the idea of raising his regional language to the dignity of a literary language.-Biography:Joseph Roumanille was the son...
, and Alphonse Tavan. He was noted for his promotion of Provençal literatureProvençal literatureOccitan literature — still sometimes called Provençal literature — is a body of texts written in Occitan in what is nowadays the South of France. It originated in the poetry of the 11th- and 12th-century troubadours, and inspired the rise of vernacular literature throughout medieval...
and founded the annualAnnual publicationAn annual publication, more often called simply an annual, is a book or a magazine, comic book or comic strip published yearly. For example, a weekly or monthly publication may produce an Annual featuring similar materials to the regular publication....
journalLiterary magazineA literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
Armana Prouvençau. Also founder of a museum of ethnographyEthnographyEthnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
in ArlesArlesArles is a city and commune in the south of France, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department, of which it is a subprefecture, in the former province of Provence....
. - Stéphane MallarméStéphane MallarméStéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
(1842–1898) The originator of the Symbolist movementSymbolism (arts)Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
in France. His Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard was one of the first to use typographyTypographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
in poetry to create different trains of thought existing simultaneously. - Paul VerlainePaul VerlainePaul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
(1844–1896) Regarded in his day as the premier poet in France, he published, in addition to his poems, Les poètes maudits, biographies of poets. See Poète mauditPoète mauditA poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit....
. - Arthur RimbaudArthur RimbaudJean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
(1854–1891) was one of the precursors of the Surrealist movementSurrealismSurrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. He wrote many remarkable works, among The Sonnet of the Vowels in which each vowelVowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
is assigned a colour. - Jules LaforgueJules LaforgueJules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...
- Jean MoréasJean MoréasJean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...
- Gustave KahnGustave KahnGustave Kahn was a French Symbolist poet and art critic.Kahn was born in Metz.He claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse; he was in any case one of the first European exponents of the form. His principal publications include Les Palais nomades, 1887, Domaine de fée, 1895, and...
- Albert SamainAlbert SamainAlbert Victor Samain was a French poet and writer of the Symbolist school.Born in Lille, his family were Flemish and had long lived in the town or its suburbs. At the time of the poet's birth, his father, Jean-Baptiste Samain, and his mother, Elisa-Henriette Mouquet, conducted a business in "wines...
- Tristan CorbièreTristan CorbièreTristan Corbière , born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life and where he died....
- Henri de RégnierHenri de RégnierHenri François Joseph de Régnier was a French symbolist poet, considered one of the most important of France during the early 20th century....
- René Ghil
- Saint-Pol Roux
- Oscar-Vladislas de MiloszOscar MiloszOscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a French-Lithuanian writer and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. His literary work was concerned with symbols and associations. A recluse, his poems were vibrant and tormented, concerned with love, loneliness and anger. Milosz was primarily...
- Albert GiraudAlbert GiraudAlbert Giraud , was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.-Biography:Giraud was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Louvain. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry...
- Emile VerhaerenEmile VerhaerenEmile Verhaeren was a Belgian poet who wrote in the French language, and one of the chief founders of the school of Symbolism....
- Georges RodenbachGeorges RodenbachGeorges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.- Biography :Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland . He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet...
- Tristan KlingsorTristan KlingsorTristan Klingsor, birth name Léon Leclère , was a French poet, musician, painter and art critic, best known for his artistic association with the composer Maurice Ravel.His pseudonym, combining the names of Wagner's hero Tristan and his villain Klingsor...
(1874–1966) - Maurice MaeterlinckMaurice MaeterlinckMaurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
Twentieth century
- Paul ValéryPaul ValéryAmbroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
(1871–1945) - Paul ClaudelPaul ClaudelPaul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism.-Life:...
- used a form of free verse to explore his mystical conversion to Catholicism. - Guillaume ApollinaireGuillaume ApollinaireWilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
's (1880–1918) first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but it was Alcools (1913) which established his reputation. These poems, influenced in part by the symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, using traditional forms and modern imagery. - Max JacobMax JacobMax Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
(a key member of the group around Apollinaire) - Pierre Jean JouvePierre Jean JouvePierre Jean Jouve was a French writer, novelist and poet. No more info at the moment.-References:...
- a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism") - Valery LarbaudValery LarbaudValery Larbaud was a French writer.-Life:He was born in Vichy, Allier, the only child of a pharmacist. His father died when he was 8, and he was brought up by his mother and aunt. His father had been owner of the Vichy Saint-Yorre mineral water springs, and the family fortune assured him an easy...
- a translator of Whitman and friend to Joyce - Victor SegalenVictor SegalenVictor Segalen was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic....
- friend to Huysmans and Claudel - Léon-Paul FargueLéon-Paul FargueLéon-Paul Fargue was a French poet and essayist.He was born in Paris, France on rue Coquilliére. As a poet he was noted for his poetry of atmosphere and detail. His work spanned numerous literary movements...
- Paul ÉluardPaul ÉluardPaul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
was a leading exponent of Surrealism. - André BretonAndré BretonAndré Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
- Louis AragonLouis AragonLouis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
- Robert DesnosRobert DesnosRobert Desnos , was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.- Biography :...
- Jacques PrévertJacques PrévertJacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain very popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. Some of the movies he wrote are extremely well regarded, with Les Enfants du Paradis considered one of the greatest films of all time.-Life and...
's works move between Surrealism and the popular songs of Parisian café culture. - Jean CocteauJean CocteauJean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
- Jules SupervielleJules SupervielleJules Supervielle was a French poet and writer born in Uruguay.Jules Supervielle always kept away from Surrealism which was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century...
- Benjamin PéretBenjamin PéretBenjamin Péret was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism.-Biography:...
- Philippe SoupaultPhilippe SoupaultPhilippe Soupault was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was active in Dadaism and later founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton...
- Pierre ReverdyPierre ReverdyPierre Reverdy was a French poet associated with surrealism and cubism.Pierre Reverdy was born in Narbonne and grew up near the Montagne Noire in his father's house. Reverdy came from a family of sculptors. His father taught him to read and write. He studied at Toulouse and Narbonne.Reverdy...
- Henri MichauxHenri MichauxHenri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism...
- René CharRené CharRené Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
- Saint-John PerseSaint-John PerseSaint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...
- Edmond JabèsEdmond Jabes----Edmond Jabès was a Jewish writer and poet, and one of the best known literary figures to write in French after World War II.- Life :...
- Yves BonnefoyYves BonnefoyYves Bonnefoy is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher....
- André du BouchetAndré du BouchetAndré du Bouchet was a French poet.- Biography :Born in Paris, he lived in France until 1941, when his family left occupied Europe for the United States. He studied at Amherst College and then at Harvard University . After teaching for a year, he returned to France...
- Jacques DupinJacques DupinJacques Dupin is a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal L'éphemère.A resident of Paris since 1944, he is director of publication at Galerie Maeght.- Jacques Dupin's poetry in English :...
- Roger GirouxRoger GirouxRoger Giroux was a French poet. Giroux's one book was awarded the Prix Max Jacob award. Translator of W.B. Yeats, Lawrence Durrell, and others. A sample of his poems is included in , edited by Paul Auster, and generally recognized as the best anthology of Modern French poetry in English...
- Philippe JaccottetPhilippe JaccottetPhilippe Jaccottet is a poet and translator who publishes in French.After completing his studies in Lausanne, he lived several years in Paris. In 1953, came to live in the town of Grignan in Provence...
- Francis PongeFrancis PongeFrancis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
- Claude Royet-JournoudClaude Royet-JournoudClaude Royet-Journoud is a contemporary French poet and artist living in Paris .-Overview:Royet-Journoud's publications in French include his tetralogy, published between 1972 and 1997: Le Renversement, La Notion d'Obstacle, Les Objets contiennent l'infini, and Les Natures indivisibles...
- Anne-Marie AlbiachAnne-Marie AlbiachAnne-Marie Albiach is a contemporary French poet and translator.-Overview:Anne-Marie Albiach's poetry is characterized by, among other things, an inventive use of spacing on the printed page...
- Emmanuel HocquardEmmanuel HocquardEmmanuel Hocquard is a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui and 49+1...
- Seyhan KurtSeyhan Kurt- Biography :Born in Grenoble, Isère, France, he started his primary education at La Verpillere, Ecole Les Marronnier and completed it at Ecole Jean Jaures in Lyon. He graduated from Dumlupinar High School in Mersin and continued his education in Selcuk University in Konya and studied French...
- Jean DaiveJean DaiveJean Daive is a poet and translator. He is the author of novels, collections of poetry and has translated work by Paul Celan and Robert Creeley among others....
- Dominique SorrenteDominique SorrenteDominique Sorrente is a French poet. He was elected laureate by the Marseille Academy in 1983, and "Guy Levis Mano" laureate in 1984.- Biography :...
- Eric Dubois
See also
- List of French language poets (alphabetical)
- Parnassian poets
- Oeuvres poetiques de Thibaut de Champagne in Medieval History of Navarre
- The Oxford Book of French Verse