French Poems

This collection illuminates the uniquely fascinating era between 1820 and 1950 in French poetry - a time in which diverse aesthetic ideas conflicted and converged as poetic forms evolved at an astonishing pace. It includes generous selections from all the established giants - among them Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Breton - as well as works from a wide variety of less well-known poets such as Claudel and Cendrars, whose innovations proved vital to the progress of poetry in France. The significant literary schools of the time are also represented in sections focusing on such movements as Romanticism, Symbolism, Cubism and Surrealism. Eloquent and inspirational, this rich and exhilarating anthology reveals an era of exceptional vitality.

A beautifully produced and exquisitely translated edition of French poems by “the best exponent of the poetry of introversion and metaphorical delirium” (Italo Calvino) The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy. Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors—Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud—this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to note: “Her poetry—with a clarity that becomes piercing—illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity.”

Inspired by the great tradition of French love poetry, New Directions presents a beautiful, small gift edition, dedicated to what makes the world go round. Filled with devotion and lust, sensuality and eroticism, fevers and overtures, these poems showcase some of the most passionate verses in the French language. From the classic sixteenth-century love sonnets of Louise Labé and Maurice Sceve to the piercing lyricism of the Romantics and the dreamlike compositions of the Surrealists, French Love Poems is the perfect, seductive gift for anyone who makes your heart flutter. This collection includes poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Claude Cahun, René Char, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Paul Éluard, Louise Labé, Stéphane Mallarmé, Anna de Noailles, Joyce Mansour, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and many others; as well as translations by Mary Ann Caws, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Frederick Seidel, Richard Sieburth, and William Carlos Williams.

Table of contents

Works by Villon, Ronsard, Voltaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, many more. Full French texts with literal English translations on facing pages. Biographical, critical information on each poet. Introduction. 31 black-and-white illustrations.

During the 20th Century, France was home to many of the world’s greatest poets. This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. Let Paul Auster guide you through some of the best poetry that 20th century France has to offer. “Indispensable . . . a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention . . . To my knowledge, no current anthology is as full and as deftly edited.”—Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review “One of the freshest and most exciting books of poetry to appear in a long while . . . Paul Auster has provided the best possible point of entry into this century's most influential body of poetry.”—Geoffrey O'Brien, The Village Voice

John Fraser, Desires: Sixty-five French poems and one small but famous German one, translated and introduced by John Fraser. The core of Desires is a mini-anthology of sixty-five French poems translated by John Fraser and described in the foreword by scholar-translator Benoit Tadié as "beautiful" and "intensely empathetic." Taken from Fraser's major online anthology A New Book of Verse, they belong in an emergent re-seeing of French poetic history. Part I consists largely of "libertine" (free-thinking) poems from the Renaissance and 17th century, in which the joys of Eros are celebrated within a realworld context of the body's limitations (age, impotence, the pox) and savage punishments for "heresy" (lethal imprisonment, burning at the stake). The language, at times unfussily direct, at others richly figurative, is refreshingly free of Petrarchan and neo-classical clichés. Among the male poets are Ronsard, Théophile de Viau, and Claude Le Petit. Among the women, witty aristocrats with minds and desires of their own, like Heliette de Vivonne and Louise-Marguerite de Lorraine. The classicism (real, not neo-) of Part I is followed in Part II by the classical romanticism of a variety of 19th and 20th century poems. There had been underground continuities during the neo-classical dominance.. The book includes major discoveries like Le Petit's 300-line "Farewell of the Pleasure Girls to the City of Paris" and Jeanne-Marie Durry's "Orpheus' Plea"; subversive poems by radicals like Louise Michel, Aristide Bruand, and Georges Brassens; and fresh translations of poems by classics like Desbordes-Valmore. Gautier, Laforgue, and Apollinaire, including the last-named's notoriously difficult "Lul de Faltenin." There is a long iconoclastic introduction, numerous notes, and an affectionate appendix on Gerard de Nerval and classical-romanticism, with very funny quotations from his fiction. The eleven hundred Anglo, French, and German poems in A New Book of Verse can be accessed via Voices in the Cave of Being.

A companion volume to An anthology of modern French poetry, 1850-1950 edited by P. Broome and G. Chesters.