The Young Fate is a long and obscure but highly evocative poem of over 500 lines in alexandrine verse by French poet Paul Valéry. This poem, frequently cited by critics as his masterpiece, presents the thoughts of a young woman… Read More ›
French Literature
Analysis of André Breton’s Vigilance
André Breton published Vigilance in 1932 in the collection Le Revolver à cheveux blancs (The Revolver with White Hair), which consists of texts written between 1915 and 1932. Vigilance is to be found in the third part, containing poems written… Read More ›
Analysis of Jacques Prévert’s To Paint the Portrait of a Bird
Jacques Prévert’s To Paint the Portrait of a Bird First paint a cage With an open door Then paint Something pretty Something simple Something beautiful Something useful For the bird Then place the canvas against a tree In a garden… Read More ›
Analysis of Joyce Mansour’s Screams
Joyce Mansour’s first volume of verse, Cris (inarticulate expressions of pain, rage, or surprise; but also, cris de bataille, battle cries), brought her to the immediate attention of France’s literati—in particular to the attention of male surrealists who found in… Read More ›
Analysis of Paul Claudel’s The Satin Slipper
The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de satin), subtitled “The Worst is Not the Surest,” is an epic verse drama by French poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel. He began writing the play after a diplomatic assignment in Brazil in 1918… Read More ›
Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s Prophecy
Like much of Aimé Césaire’s poetry, Prophecy possesses a stream-of-consciousness style in unrhymed, free verse with lines of varying length. The poet reminisces about Caribbean islands before European colonization, the fecundity of their vegetation, and the wonders of the animal… Read More ›
Analysis of René Depestre’s Prelude
Prelude (Prélude) is the first poem in René Depestre’s best-known collection, A Rainbow for the Christian West (Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien, 1967). It is written in unrhymed free verse and divided into four parts, the last of which is… Read More ›
Analysis of André du Bouchet’s Painting
One of du Bouchet’s most challenging palimpsests of synesthetic theory and praxis, his book-length poem Peinture (1983) at once discusses and inhabits creative processes of unwriting and unpainting. Examining fluid thresholds between “painting,” disappearance, and the open, the text performs… Read More ›
Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
The poem—divided into stanzas of varying length and written in unrhymed free verse—begins with the refrain, repeated throughout, “At the end of the wee hours . . . ,” as the speaker wakes from a troubled sleep to survey the… Read More ›
Analysis of René Char’s The Meteor of August 13th
In several respects Le Météore du 13 août is typical of char’s work, particularly of the collection Furor and Mystery, in which it appeared in 1947. In general terms, the poem is a series of images that must be understood… Read More ›
Analysis of Louis Aragon’s The Lilacs and the Roses
Louis Aragon’s collection Le Crève-cœur (Heartbreak, 1941) contains 22 poems written between October 1939 and October 1940, the last nine of which express the heartbreak caused by the calamity of the German invasion of France and the subsequent occupation. The… Read More ›
Analysis of Andrée Chedid’s Landscapes
The poem Landscapes has been taken from Selected Poems of Andrée Chedid. The piece was originally published in Textes pour une figure (Texts for a Figure), Chedid’s first book of French poetry, which dates back to 1949. It also reappears… Read More ›
Analysis of John Yvan Goll’s Landless
Yvan Goll’s Jean Sans Terre is a collection of five books of interrelated poems written over eight years (from 1936 to 1944). Goll maps the anguish of dispossession, the suffering and distress of the alienated human individual suffering the worst… Read More ›
Analysis of Anna de Noailles’s It is After the Moments
This poem by Anna de Noailles, from Les Forces éternelles (1921), explores themes of betrayal, isolation, and renewal. Its persona, or narrative voice, expresses frustration at finding oneself, after an implied moment of intimacy, alone beside a now somnolent lover…. Read More ›
Analysis of Jacques Dupin’s Hooks of the Idyll
Published first in 1967 in Jacques Dupin’s poetry volume Proximité du murmure (The Encroaching Murmur), Agrafes de l’idylle is constituted of slow, breathless, fragmentary sentences. Its title in the original French sounds a radical negation of writing: a cognate of… Read More ›
Analysis of Léon Damas’s Hiccup
“Hiccup” (“Hoquet”), like “Bargain”, is from Damas’s first collection, Pigments (1937). It reveals the inferiority complex felt by blacks of Africa and the Caribbean because of centuries of abuse and exploitation by white European colonials. The solution to this problem… Read More ›
Analysis of Paul Valéry’s The Graveyard by the Sea
The Graveyard by the Sea is a meditative poem by French poet Paul Valéry. The poem was inspired by the cemetery in his birthplace, Sète, where his parents were buried. Valéry considered the poem one of his finest meldings of… Read More ›
Analysis of Édouard Glissant’s Gorée
Gorée initially appeared in Édouard Glissant’s collection Yokes (1979), but is also included in the collection Black Salt (1998), an anthology in English translation of three separate collections of Glissant’s poetry—Le sel noir (Black Salt), Le sang rivé (Riveted Blood),… Read More ›
French Rap
In the 20th century, French-language poetry was often influenced by American music. Guillaume Apollinaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Boris Vian innovatively mined jazz and blues music for their own modern poetry. In much the same way, French rap musicians have… Read More ›
Analysis of Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes
Five Great Odes (Cinq Grandes Odes) comprises five confessional poems composed by French poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel between 1901 and 1908. They were collected and published in book form in 1910. The first poem, The Muses (Les Muses),… Read More ›
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