This anthology is the companion volume to The Appreciation of Modern French Poetry, the aim of which was to give detailed preliminary help with the problems of poetic appreciation. The fourteen poets represented here provide a varied and exciting introduction to what is probably the richest century of French poetry, from 1850 to 1950. Hugo, the colossus of the nineteenth century, whose work gives new resonance and vitality to imaginative vision, opens the anthology, and Michaux, the most individual and 'modern' of twentieth-century poets in that he bridges the gap between poetry and...

Biographies of poets are often rich in human interest; manuals of literary history can be full of broad insight and suggestive parallels. But it is all too easy to let the study of French poetry drift towards lives, loves and -isms and away from the appreciation of its supremely creative use of language. Born of the belief that the proper study of poetry is the poem itself, this book seeks to concentrate on the poetic process at work on the page. Its aim is to encourage the student and the general reader to penetrate the textual richness of modern French verse where verbal artistry combines...