French Literature

Guiilaume Apollinaire, a leading figure amongst the young writers and artists in France until his death in 1918, published Alcools, his first book of poems, in 1913. With its wide range of verse forms and contrasting registers of style, Alcools had a considerable influence on Surrealist poetry. The poems provide a splendid example of the lyrical art in which the paradoxes of Apollinaire are held in high poetic tension. The editor's introduction and notes take place in the 20th Century and explain allusion and difficulties in the text.

The greatest poet of the French Renaissance, Pierre de Ronsard wrote poems that were committed to memory by Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, with whom he maintained a close friendship. He influenced Yeats and other modern poets. This is the first complete translation into English of one of the great sonnet sequences. These poems follow the poet's love of an unattainable beauty, Cassandra, enhanced with explorations of classical myth. Clive Lawrence's translation won the John Dryden Translation Competition at the University of East Anglia.

It's no exaggeration to say that Charles Baudelaire invented modern poetry. Flowers of Evil has been a bible for poets from Rimbaud to T.S. Eliot to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, with Georges Dillon, brought out an inspired rhymed version of the book in 1936. Here it is reprinted, with the French originals, for the first time in many years. Millay and Dillon's versions are virtuosic in their handling of rhyme and meter, and their take on the Flowers of Evil as a whole is among the most persuasive English, capturing in flowing lines comparable to Baudelaire's the tortured consciousness and troubling sensuality that are his opulent music's counterpart. The book also allows readers a new appreciation of the range of Millay's own achievement as a poet and translator.

A poet of undeniable stature, Anna de Noailles was respected and beloved by France's literary and lay population alike, counting among her admirers Proust, Cocteau, and Colette. She was the only female poet of her time in France to receive the highest public recognition. Noailles constructed an original poetic world view, drawing inspiration from Greek paganism and Nietzsche's radical thought. Her work is often described as ecstatic, sensual, erotic, sometimes violent, and usually marked by a tragic undercurrent. This is the first anthology of her works to appear in English.

Crowned 'Prince of Poets' in his later years, Paul Verlaine stands out among the iconoclastic founders of French modernist verse. This diglot anthology offers the most comprehensive selection of Verlaine's poetry available in English translation. Verlaine's famous works are presented here alongside poems never previously translated into English, including neglected political works and prison pieces only recently brought to light, which reveal social, homoerotic, and even pornographic inspirations. The poems are organized not by collections and date of publication but by themes and time of composition. This innovation, along with Valazza's extensive supporting materials, will help the curious student or scholar explore the master poet's work in the context of his troubled life: from the beginning of his literary career among the Parnassians to his affair with Rimbaud and the end of his marriage, his time in prison, and his bohemian lifestyle up to his death in 1896. Verlaine, the poet of ambiguity, has always been a challenge to translate. Rosenberg expertly crafts language that privileges the musicality of Verlaine's verse while respecting each poem's meaning and pace. Featuring 192 poems in French with English translations, this collection will appeal to scholars and poetry enthusiasts alike.

In this new translation of Arthur Rimbaud—illustrious among the 19th-century symbolists and one of the most influential poets upon the modern mind—Donald Revell captures the child-like wonder and tortured, revelatory despair of these poems, which changed, in so many ways, how we think of what a poem can say and mean. Revell's choice of a most immediate vernacular gives the modern reader all the heady brilliance in Rimbaud's rebelliousness. Yet, as Revell explains in his essay 'Outrageous Innocence, Innocence Outraged,' which is offered as afterword in this translation of A Season in Hell, Rimbaud's rebellious sensuality was redolent with the oracular. Revell's essay offers the story of Rimbaud—his wildly creative youth, his years of breaking with all traditions of morality and decorum, his fame as the genius of French letters who is identified as one of the creators of free verse because of his rhythm experiments in prose poems. And Revell's essay places these poems in the larger historical narrative of the literature of rebellious youth that has molded much of our contemporary culture. Published with the French on facing pages, this translation will open many readers to the pleasure of reading this wild child who was remembered after his death as one of the masters of French poetry.

Although best known as the author of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo was primarily a poet--one of the most important and prolific in French history. Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions. Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions. Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.

Antoinette Du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières was a French poet renowned for her beauty and her intelligence. With her father serving as Maître d’hotel to French queens consort Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria, Antoinette grew up in the royal courts. Married at 13, she attracted the attention of the prince of Condé, and became a favorite in the court of Sun King Louis XIV for her literary prowess and her looks. Throughout her life she would write a wide variety of poems from odes, songs, ballads, and more. Her daughter Antoinette-Thérèse Des Houlières was also a poet, and it is she who published a lot of her mother’s works (Snippet of Paris).

Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet's work. Rosemary Lloyd considers all of Baudelaire's writing, including his criticism, theory, and letters, as well as poetry. In doing so, she sets the poems themselves in a richer context, in a landscape of real places populated with actual people. She shows how Baudelaire's poetry was marked by the influence of the writers and artists who preceded him or were his contemporaries. Lloyd builds an image of Baudelaire's world around major themes of his writing, childhood, women, reading, the city, dreams, art, nature, death. Throughout, she finds that his words and themes echo the historical and physical realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Lloyd also explores the possibilities and limitations of translation. As an integral part of her treatment of the life, poetry, and letters of her subject, she also reflects on published translations of Baudelaire's work and offers some of her own translations.

Mary Shaw covers all aspects of French poetry from the Middle Ages to the present day in this text. Chapters focus on verse, genres, poetry, politics and philosophy among other topics. Designed specifically for use in courses, the volume contains a useful glossary of poetic terms, and is invaluable to students as well as teachers.

This volume of essays, written by scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints, presents a fresh approach to the study of nineteenth-century French poetry. Each of the eleven essays, on different poets from Lamartine to Mallarmé and Laforgue, focuses on the detailed organisation of a single poem. The method of close reading has been adopted in order to effect an introduction to the analysis of the 'basics' of poetic language (sound, metre, syntax, etc.), and in order to explore and illustrate some of the claims and arguments about poetry arising from developments in the prevailing literary theory. Theoretical positions are posed and tested in the terms of practical analysis and interpretation. Christopher Prendergast's introduction to the volume situates the essays in a series of general perspectives and contexts, and Clive Scott has provided an appendix on French versification.

This book is uniquely designed for those interested in the radical possibilities of poetry, and for students of French literature at graduate and undergraduate level. The development of modern French poetry is marked by striking formal innovation -- poemesen prose, vers libres, versets, calligrammes, lettrisme, spatialisme, poesie concrete, poesie eclatee -- which break the traditional moulds of versification without abandoning the values of poetry, with its implicit aesthetic criteria. This informal study focuses on ways in which visual stimuli in particular, in a context of technological progress in communications, have governed poets' responses to the challenge of formal freedom. What emerges is the centrality of the concept of `iconic re-enactment'. A sense of adequation, of appropriateness, guides the poet away from writing as decoration and towards the creation of organic wholeness for each text or textual element; away from separable extrinsic features towards an intrinsic unity of form and content. This approach takes on new force when the powerful technical constraint of verse is replaced by shaping constraints of a no less demanding and thus imaginatively stimulating kind.