French Poetry

Nothing is better than poetry to help you get inside a person’s mind, to understand a culture, or to gain perspective on a time period.  Poetry isn’t always an easy read, but your effort is rewarded with a greater understanding of people, places, and times.

Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also wrote essays, art critiques, and translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French.  His most famous work is a collection of poems called, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil).  The poems express the changing nature of beauty in Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire’s style was very original and unique – writing his poems is a prose-poetry manner (no rhymes, no particular rhythm).  He was a huge influence to many young French poets who came after him.

To get an idea of Baudelaire’s prose-poetry, check out Anywhere Out of the World, a poem about not feeling that you quite fit anywhere, or At One O’Clock in the Morning, a poem about being overwhelmed and overloaded.  Another option would be to browse through Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), Baudelaire’s most famous collection of poetry.

Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 – November 10, 1891) was a French poet who influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and helped start the movement of surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age and stopped completely before he turned 21, writing most of his work between the ages of 17 and 20. Because he was so young when he wrote his poems, many of the themes are great for young people nowadays.  Rimbaud was known as a libertine, someone who did not believe we have to live by any sort of moral code, that life is all about your own physical pleasure.  He died from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday.

You can find several examples of Rimbaud’s poems online, the most famous being The Drunken Boat, a long metaphor in which the narrator envisions himself to be a boat exploring the world and tossed around in the sea, and Novel, which is about the carefree life of being seventeen years old – a great poem for teenagers.

André Breton (February 19, 1896 – September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and playwright. He is known as the founder of Surrealism, which is a style of art and writing that began in the early 1920s. The idea was to erase the line between dream and reality. Artists painted strange and unsettling, created strange creatures from everyday objects, and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.  Breton was considered a leader of the movement, which developed in Paris in the years after WWI.  Eventually the Surrealism movement spread around the world affecting visual arts, literature, film, music, and even political thought and social theory.

Breton’s poems are quite strange, and you can see some of his best known works, like Freedom of Love, Always for the First Time, Less Time, and Postman Cheval can be found online.