French Language and Literature
100-399: Guillaume Apollinaire ( French: [ɡijom apɔlinɛʁ] ; born Kostrowicki ; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet , playwright, short story writer , novelist and art critic of Polish descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism . He
200-755: A Jewish writer of "French expression", but he managed to survive. His youngest son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco . Details of his time with the BEF and last meeting with his son appear in his work of 1949 Le lotissement du ciel (translated simply as Sky ). In 1950, Cendrars settled down in the rue Jean-Dolent in Paris, across from the La Santé Prison . There he collaborated frequently with Radiodiffusion Française. He finally published again in 1956. The novel, Emmène-moi au bout du monde !… ,
300-464: A Martial-like epigram ; this poetry collection also included the first published poems of Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard . Around Ronsard, Du Bellay and Jean Antoine de Baïf there formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court (generally known today as La Pléiade , although use of this term is debated). The character of their literary program was given in Du Bellay's manifesto,
400-551: A Swiss watchmaker in Russia. While living in St. Petersburg , he began to write, thanks to the encouragement of R.R., a librarian at the National Library of Russia . There he wrote the poem, " La Légende de Novgorode ", which R.R. translated into Russian. Supposedly fourteen copies were made, but Cendrars claimed to have no copies of it, and none could be located during his lifetime. In 1995,
500-577: A bourgeois francophone family, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother. They sent young Frédéric to a German boarding school, but he ran away. At the Realschule in Basel in 1902 he met his lifelong friend the sculptor August Suter . Next they enrolled him in a school in Neuchâtel, but he had little enthusiasm for his studies. Finally, in 1904, he left school due to poor performance and began an apprenticeship with
600-485: A café in Switzerland in 1916—came to Paris in 1920, but by 1924 the writers around Paul Éluard , André Breton , Louis Aragon and Robert Desnos —heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud 's notion of the unconscious —had modified dada provocation into Surrealism . In writing and in the visual arts, and by using automatic writing , creative games (like the cadavre exquis ) and altered states (through alcohol and narcotics),
700-492: A cigarette with his one good hand", at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris. He was also befriended by John Dos Passos , who was his closest American counterpart both as a world traveler (even more than Hemingway) and in his adaptation of Cendrars's cinematic uses of montage in writing, most notably in his great trilogy of the 1930s, U.S.A. One of the most gifted observers of the times, Dos Passos brought Cendrars to American readers in
800-499: A collection in 1919 under the title Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems). Some were tributes to his fellow artists. In 1954, a collaboration between Cendrars and Léger resulted in Paris, ma ville (Paris, My City), in which the poet and illustrator together expressed their love of the French capital. As Léger died in 1955, the book was not published until 1987. His writing career
900-718: A direct heir of Rimbaud, a visionary rather than what the French call un homme de lettres ("a man of letters"), a term that for him was predicated on a separation of intellect and life. Like Rimbaud, who writes in "The Alchemy of the Word" in A Season in Hell , "I liked absurd paintings over door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings," Cendrars similarly says of himself in Der Sturm (1913), "I like legends, dialects, mistakes of language, detective novels,
1000-512: A form of divine inspiration (see Pontus de Tyard for example), a possession by the muses akin to romantic passion, prophetic fervor or alcoholic delirium. The forms that dominate the poetic production of the period are the Petrarchian sonnet cycle (developed around an amorous encounter or an idealized woman) and the Horace / Anacreon ode (especially of the " carpe diem " - life is short, seize
1100-577: A literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the Marquis de Sade , whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, "The freest spirit that ever existed." The war-weakened Apollinaire died at the age of 38 on 9 November 1918 of influenza during
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#17328805052731200-497: A literary epic of the modern adventurer. He was a friend of the American writer Henry Miller , who called him his "great idol", a man he "really venerated as a writer". He knew many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. In 1918, his friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait. He was acquainted with Ernest Hemingway , who mentions having seen him "with his broken boxer's nose and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling
1300-588: A major force in experimental writing and the international art world until the Second World War. The effects of surrealism would later also be felt among authors who were not strictly speaking part of the movement, such as the poet Alexis Saint-Léger Léger (who wrote under the name Saint-John Perse ), the poet Edmond Jabès (who came to France in 1956 when the Jewish population was expelled from his native Egypt) and Georges Bataille . The Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars
1400-422: A movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others. In 1917, Apollinaire produced Peintures de Léopold Survage; Dessins et aquarelles d’Irène Lagut (Paintings by Léopold Survage; Drawings and Watercolors by Irène Lagut), which is included in the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami, in
1500-415: A poem). Jean Racine was seen as the greatest tragedy writer of his age. Finally, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux became the theorizer of poetic classicism: his "Art poétique" (1674) praised reason and logic (Boileau elevated Malherbe as the first of the rational poets), believability, moral usefulness and moral correctness; it elevated tragedy and the poetic epic as the great genres and recommended imitation of
1600-534: A regular syntactical pause, called a "césure" ( cesura ): In traditional poetry, the césure cannot occur between two words that are syntactically linked (such as a subject and its verb), nor can it occur after an unelided mute e. (For more on poetic meter, see Poetic meter .) For example: Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant d'une femme inconnue et que j'aime et qui m'aime... ( Paul Verlaine , "Mon rêve familier", from Poèmes saturniens ) The verses are alexandrines (12 syllables). The mute e in "d'une"
1700-450: A rigidity of form and an emotional detachment (elements of which echo the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer whose aesthetic theories would also have an influence on the symbolists). The naturalist tendency to see life without illusions and to dwell on its more depressing and sordid aspects appears in an intensified degree in the immensely influential poetry of Charles Baudelaire , but with profoundly romantic elements derived from
1800-465: A sadic hand / In the rips in the sky insane locomotives / Take flight / In the gaps / Whirling wheels mouths voices / And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels"). The published work was printed within washes of color by the painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk as a fold-out two meters in length, together with her design of brilliant colors down the left-hand side, a small map of the Transsiberian railway in
1900-418: A serious shrapnel wound to the temple, from which he would never fully recover. He wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he coined the word " Surrealism " in the programme notes for Jean Cocteau 's and Erik Satie 's ballet Parade , first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes . Apollinaire's status as
2000-443: Is a category of French literature . It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France . The modern French language does not have a significant stress accent (as English does) or long and short syllables (as Latin does). This means that the French metric line is generally not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables (see syllabic verse ; in
2100-551: Is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used" [ Tout bien examiné, je crois en effet qu'il vaut mieux adopter surréalisme que surnaturalisme que j'avais d'abord employé ]. He described Parade as "a kind of surrealism" ( une sorte de surréalisme ) when he wrote the program note the following week, thus coining the word three years before Surrealism emerged as an art movement in Paris. Apollinaire served as an infantry officer in World War I and, in 1916, received
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#17328805052732200-417: Is credited with coining the term "Cubism" in 1911 to describe the emerging art movement , the term Orphism in 1912, and the term "Surrealism" in 1917 to describe the works of Erik Satie . He wrote poems without punctuation, in his attempt to be resolutely modern in both form and subject. Apollinaire wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), which became
2300-459: Is often identified as his muse. While there, he dabbled in anarchism and spoke out as a Dreyfusard in defense of Dreyfus's innocence. Metzinger painted the first Cubist portrait of Apollinaire. In his Vie anecdotique (16 October 1911), the poet proudly writes: "I am honoured to be the first model of a Cubist painter, Jean Metzinger, for a portrait exhibited in 1910 at the Salon des Indépendants." It
2400-419: Is pronounced and is counted in the syllables (whereas the mute e's at the end of "rêve", "étrange", "femme" and "j'aime"—which are followed by vowels—are elided and hypermetrical); the mute e at the end of "qui m'aime" is hypermetrical (this is a so-called " feminine rhyme "). No word occurs across the sixth to seventh syllable in both lines, thus creating the cesura. The rules of classical French poetry (from
2500-577: Is the subject of his poem "Orion" in Travel Notes : "It is my star / It is in the shape of a hand / It is my hand gone up to the sky ...". It was during the attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the army. Jean Cocteau introduced him to Eugenia Errázuriz , who proved a supportive, if at times possessive, patron. Around 1918 he visited her house and
2600-587: The Byronic myth of the anti-hero and the romantic poet. The poetry of Baudelaire and much of the literature in the latter half of the century (or " fin de siècle ") were often characterized as " decadent " for their lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Paul Verlaine used the expression " poète maudit " ("accursed poet") in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Tristan Corbière , Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or had been ignored by
2700-496: The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and was recognized as "Fallen for France" ( Mort pour la France ) because of his commitment during the war. Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki was born in Rome, Italy, and was raised speaking French, Italian, and Polish . He emigrated to France in his late teens and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelika Kostrowicka,
2800-473: The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 ravaging Europe at the time, two years after being wounded in World War I . Due to his military service for the duration of the war, he was declared to have "Died for France" ( Mort pour la France ) by the French government. He was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery , Paris. In 1900 he wrote his first novel Mirely, ou le petit trou pas cher (pornographic), which
2900-573: The language poetry movement. (includes both trouvères and troubadours ) Blaise Cendrars Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars , was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement. He was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds , Neuchâtel , Switzerland, rue de la Paix 27, into
3000-558: The "Defense and Illustration of the French Language" (1549) which maintained that French (like the Tuscan of Petrarch and Dante ) was a worthy language for literary expression and which promulgated a program of linguistic and literary production (including the imitation of Latin and Greek genres) and purification. For some of the members of the Pléiade, the act of the poetry itself was seen as
3100-413: The 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt. Apollinaire's gift to Picasso of the original 1907 manuscript was one of the artist's most prized possessions. The book was made into a movie in 1986 . Shortly after his death, Mercure de France published Calligrammes , a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to
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3200-642: The 15th century. Charles, duc d'Orléans was a noble and head of one of the most powerful families in France during the Hundred Years' War . Captured in the Battle of Agincourt , he was a prisoner of the English from 1415–1441 and his ballades often speak of loss and isolation. Christine de Pisan was one of the most prolific writers of her age; her "Cité des Dames" is considered a kind of "feminist manifesto". François Villon
3300-592: The 1920s and 30s by translating Cendrars's major long poems The Transsiberian and Panama and in his 1926 prose-poetic essay "Homer of the Transsiberian," which was reprinted from The Saturday Review one year later in Orient Express. After the war, Cendrars became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. Cendrars's departure from poetry in the 1920s roughly coincided with his break from
3400-519: The Baudelairian poetic exploration of modern life in evoking planes, the Eiffel Tower and urban wastelands, and he brought poetry into contact with cubism through his " Calligrammes ", a form of visual poetry . Inspired by Rimbaud, Paul Claudel used a form of free verse to explore his mystical conversion to Catholicism. Other poets from this period include: Paul Valéry , Max Jacob (a key member of
3500-560: The Belgians Albert Giraud , Emile Verhaeren , Georges Rodenbach and Maurice Maeterlinck and others have been called symbolists, although each author's personal literary project was unique. From a technical point of view, the Romantics were responsible for a return to (and sometimes a modification of) many of the fixed-form poems used during the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as for the creation of new forms. The sonnet however
3600-671: The Bulgarian poet Kiril Kadiiski claimed to have found one of the Russian translations in Sofia , but the authenticity of the document remains contested on the grounds of factual, typographic, orthographic, and stylistic analysis. In 1907, Sauser returned to Switzerland, where he studied medicine at the University of Berne . During this period, he wrote his first verified poems, Séquences , influenced by Remy de Gourmont 's Le Latin mystique . Cendrars
3700-625: The English Army ), was seized before publication by the Gestapo, which sought him out and sacked his library in his country home, while he fled into hiding in Aix-en-Provence . He comments on the trampling of his library and temporary "extinction of my personality" at the beginning of L'homme foudroyé (in the double sense of "the man who was blown away"). In Occupied France, the Gestapo listed Cendrars as
3800-640: The Paris artistic community, encouraging younger artists and writing about them. For instance, he described the Hungarian photographer Ervin Marton as an "ace of white and black photography" in a preface to his exhibition catalogue. He was with the British Expeditionary Force in northern France at the beginning of the German invasion in 1940, and his book that immediately followed, Chez l'armée anglaise ( With
3900-637: The Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano- Arab world. The Occitan or Provençal poets were called troubadours , from the word "trobar" (to find, to invent). Lyric poets in Old French are called " trouvères ", using the Old French version of the word (for more information on the "trouvères", their poetic forms, extant works and their social status, see the article of that name). The occitan troubadours were amazingly creative in
4000-503: The Renaissance, there was a brief attempt to develop a French poetics based on long and short syllables [see " musique mesurée "]). The most common metric lengths are the ten-syllable line ( decasyllable ), the eight-syllable line ( octosyllable ) and the twelve-syllable line (the so-called " alexandrin "). In traditional French poetry, all permissible liaisons are made between words. Furthermore, unlike modern spoken French (at least in
4100-426: The United States. In 1907 Apollinaire published the well-known erotic novel , The Eleven Thousand Rods ( Les Onze Mille Verges ). Officially banned in France until 1970, various printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel. Another erotic novel attributed to him was The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan) , in which
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4200-417: The artist does not take from visual reality, but creates entirely by himself. [...] An Orphic painter's works should convey an untroubled aesthetic pleasure , but at the same time a meaningful structure and sublime significance . According to Apollinaire Orphism represented a move towards a completely new art-form, much as music was to literature. The term Surrealism was first used by Apollinaire concerning
4300-494: The ballet Parade in 1917. The poet Arthur Rimbaud wanted to be a visionary, to perceive the hidden side of things within the realm of another reality. In continuity with Rimbaud, Apollinaire went in search of a hidden and mysterious reality. The term "surrealism" appeared for the first time in March 1917 (Chronologie de Dada et du surréalisme, 1917) in a letter by Apollinaire to Paul Dermée : "All things considered, I think in fact it
4400-465: The basis for Francis Poulenc 's 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias . Influenced by Symbolist poetry in his youth, he was admired during his lifetime by the young poets who later formed the nucleus of the Surrealist group ( Breton , Aragon , Soupault ). He revealed very early on an originality that freed him from any school of influence and made him one of the precursors of the literary revolution of
4500-480: The catalogue of the Brussels Indépendants show, Apollinaire stated that these 'new painters' accepted the name of Cubists which has been given to them. He described Cubism as a new manifestation and high art [ manifestation nouvelle et très élevée de l'art ], not a system that constrains talent [ non-point un système contraignant les talents ], and the differences which characterize not only the talents but even
4600-552: The century, an attempt to be objective was made in poetry by the group of writers known as the Parnassians —which included Leconte de Lisle , Théodore de Banville , Catulle Mendès , Sully-Prudhomme , François Coppée , José María de Heredia and (early in his career) Paul Verlaine —who (using Théophile Gautier 's notion of art for art's sake and the pursuit of the beautiful) strove for exact and faultless workmanship, and selected exotic and classical subjects which they treated with
4700-512: The chivalric romances ("roman", such as the tales of King Arthur written by Chrétien de Troyes ) were usually written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets . Medieval French lyric poetry was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence —including Toulouse , Poitiers , and the Aquitaine region—where "langue d'oc" was spoken ( Occitan language ); in their turn,
4800-547: The critics. But with the publication of Jean Moréas "Symbolist Manifesto" in 1886, it was the term symbolism which was most often applied to the new literary environment. The writers Stéphane Mallarmé , Paul Verlaine , Paul Valéry , Joris-Karl Huysmans , Arthur Rimbaud , Jules Laforgue , Jean Moréas , Gustave Kahn , Albert Samain , Jean Lorrain , Remy de Gourmont , Pierre Louÿs , Tristan Corbière , Henri de Régnier , Villiers de l'Isle-Adam , Stuart Merrill , René Ghil , Saint-Pol Roux , Oscar-Vladislas de Milosz ,
4900-483: The day - variety). Ronsard also tried early on to adapt the Pindaric ode into French. Throughout the period, the use of mythology is frequent, but so too is a depiction of the natural world (woods, rivers). Other genres include the paradoxical encomium (such as Remy Belleau 's poem praising the oyster), the " blason " of the female body (a poetic description of a body part), and propagandistic verse. Several poets of
5000-422: The development of verse forms and poetic genres, but their greatest impact on medieval literature was perhaps in their elaboration of complex code of love and service called "fin amors" or, more generally, courtly love . For more information on the troubadour tradition, see Provençal literature . By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from
5100-466: The eighteenth century, filled with life as they are, unlike Diderot's, and the work of a single man, who was neither an ideologue nor a theoretician". Cendrars regarded the early modernist movement from roughly 1910 to the mid-1920s as a period of genuine discovery in the arts and in 1919 contrasted "theoretical cubism" with "the group's three antitheoreticians," Picasso, Braque, and Léger, whom he described as "three strongly personal painters who represent
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#17328805052735200-411: The expression Ars nova [new art, or new technique] to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age). The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chansons was Guillaume de Machaut . (For more on music, see medieval music ; for more on music in the period after Machaux, see Renaissance music ). French poetry continued to evolve in
5300-599: The first half of the 20th century. His art is not based on any theory, but on a simple principle: the act of creating must come from the imagination, from intuition, because it must be as close as possible to life, to nature, to the environment, and to the human being. Apollinaire was also active as a journalist and art critic for Le Matin , L'Intransigeant , L'Esprit nouveau , Mercure de France , and Paris Journal . In 1912 Apollinaire cofounded Les Soirées de Paris , an artistic and literary magazine. Two years after being wounded in World War I , Apollinaire died during
5400-407: The first half of the century was dominated by Romanticism , associated with such authors as Victor Hugo , Alphonse de Lamartine , and Gérard de Nerval . The effect of the romantic movement would continue to be felt in the latter half of the century in wildly diverse literary developments, such as "realism", "symbolism", and the so-called fin de siècle "decadent" movement (see below). Victor Hugo
5500-444: The first years of the 16th century is characterised by the elaborate sonorous and graphic experimentation and skillful word games of a number of Northern poets (such as Guillaume Cretin , Jean Lemaire de Belges and Jean Molinet ), generally called "les Grands Rhétoriqueurs " who continued to develop poetic techniques from the previous century. Soon however, the impact of Petrarch (the sonnet cycle addressed to an idealised lover,
5600-542: The flesh of girls, the sun, the Eiffel Tower." Spontaneity, boundless curiosity, a craving for travel, and immersion in actualities were his hallmarks both in life and art. He was drawn to this same immersion in Balzac's flood of novels on 19th-century French society and in Casanova's travels and adventures through 18th-century Europe, which he set down in dozens of volumes of memoirs that Cendrars considered "the true Encyclopedia of
5700-460: The grandfather of poetic classicism. Poetry came to be a part of the social games in noble salons (see "salons" above), where epigrams , satirical verse, and poetic descriptions were all common (the most famous example is "La Guirlande de Julie" (1641) at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a collection of floral poems written by the salon members for the birthday of the host's daughter). The linguistic aspects of
5800-452: The group around Apollinaire), Pierre Jean Jouve (a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism"), Valery Larbaud (a translator of Whitman and friend to Joyce), Victor Segalen (friend to Huysmans and Claudel), Léon-Paul Fargue (who studied with Stéphane Mallarmé and was close to Valéry and Larbaud). The First World War generated even more radical tendencies. The Dada movement—which began in
5900-401: The late 16th to the 18th century) also put forward the following: For more on rhymes in French poetry, see Rhyme in French . Poetic forms developed by medieval French poets include: Other poetic forms found in French poetry: As is the case in other literary traditions, poetry is the earliest French literature; the development of prose as a literary form was a late phenomenon (in
6000-453: The late Middle Ages, many of the romances and epics initially written in verse were converted into prose versions). In the medieval period, the choice of verse form was generally dictated by the genre: the Old French epics (" chanson de geste ", like the anonymous Song of Roland , regarded by some as the national epic of France) were usually written in ten-syllable assonanced "laisses" (blocks of varying length of assonanced lines), while
6100-484: The later 1660s when the phenomenon had spread to the provinces) for its linguistic and romantic excesses (often linked to a misogynistic disdain for intellectual women), the French language and social manners of the 17th century were permanently changed by it. From the 1660s, three poets stand out. Jean de La Fontaine gained enormous celebrity through his Aesop inspired "Fables" (1668–1693) which were written in an irregular verse form (different meter lengths are used in
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#17328805052736200-580: The most popular members of the artistic community of Paris (both in Montmartre and Montparnasse ). His friends and collaborators in that period included Pablo Picasso , Henri Rousseau , Gertrude Stein , Max Jacob , André Salmon , André Breton , André Derain , Faik Konitza , Blaise Cendrars , Giuseppe Ungaretti , Pierre Reverdy , Alexandra Exter , Jean Cocteau , Erik Satie , Ossip Zadkine , Marc Chagall , Marcel Duchamp and Jean Metzinger . He became romantically involved with Marie Laurencin , who
6300-405: The north of France), a silent or mute 'e' counts as a syllable before a consonant and is pronounced, but is elided before a vowel (where " h aspiré " counts as a consonant). When it falls at the end of a line, the mute "e" is hypermetrical (outside the count of syllables). (For more on pronunciation of French, see French phonology ). The ten-syllable and 12-syllable lines are generally marked by
6400-888: The overall effect), and more orthodox, though still modernist poems informed by Apollinaire's experiences in the First World War and in which he often used the technique of automatic writing. In his youth Apollinaire lived for a short while in Belgium , mastering the Walloon dialect sufficiently to write poetry, some of which has survived. French poetry French literary history Medieval 16th century • 17th century 18th century • 19th century 20th century • Contemporary Literature by country France • Quebec Postcolonial • Haiti Franco-American Portals France • Literature French literature Wikisource French poetry ( French : Poésie française )
6500-446: The period—Jean Antoine de Baïf (who founded an "Académie de Poésie et Musique" in 1570), Blaise de Vigenère and others—attempted to adapt into French the Latin , Greek or Hebrew poetic meters ; these experiments were called "vers mesurés" and "prose mesuré" (for more, see the article " musique mesurée "). Although the royal court was the center of much of the century's poetry, Lyon –
6600-558: The phenomenon associated with the " précieuses " (similar to Euphuism in England, Gongorism in Spain and Marinism in Italy) -- the use of highly metaphorical (sometimes obscure) language, the purification of socially unacceptable vocabulary—was tied to this poetic salon spirit and would have an enormous impact on French poetic and courtly language. Although "préciosité" was often mocked (especially in
6700-578: The poets of antiquity. "Classicism" in poetry would dominate until the pre-romantics and the French Revolution. From a technical point of view, the poetic production from the late 17th century on increasingly relied on stanza forms incorporating rhymed couplets, and by the 18th century fixed-form poems – and, in particular, the sonnet – were largely avoided. The resulting versification – less constrained by meter and rhyme patterns than Renaissance poetry – more closely mirrored prose. French poetry from
6800-408: The principal modes of literary production of noble gentlemen and of non-noble professional writers in their patronage in the 17th century. Poetry was used for all purposes. A great deal of 17th- and 18th-century poetry was "occasional", written to celebrate a particular event (a marriage, birth, military victory) or to solemnize a tragic occurrence (a death, military defeat), and this kind of poetry
6900-511: The reign of Henri IV and Louis XIII was still largely inspired by the poets of the late Valois court , some of their excesses and poetic liberties found censure, especially in the work of François de Malherbe who criticized La Pléiade 's and Philippe Desportes 's irregularities of meter or form (the suppression of the cesura by a hiatus , sentences clauses spilling over into the next line "enjambement", neologisms constructed from Greek words, etc.). The later 17th century would see Malherbe as
7000-434: The relationship between poetry and the visual arts, and Stéphane Mallarmé 's notions of the limits of language. Another important influence was the German poet Paul Celan . Poets concerned with these philosophical/language concerns—especially concentrated around the review " L'Ephémère "—include Yves Bonnefoy , André du Bouchet , Jacques Dupin , Roger Giroux and Philippe Jaccottet . Many of these ideas were also key to
7100-453: The same time Gertrude Stein was beginning to write prose in the manner of Pablo Picasso 's paintings. Cendrars liked to claim that his poem's first printing of one hundred fifty copies would, when unfolded, reach the height of the Eiffel Tower . Cendrars's relationship with painters such as Chagall and Léger led him to write a series of revolutionary abstract short poems, published in
7200-438: The second largest city in France in the Renaissance – also had its poets and humanists, most notably Maurice Scève , Louise Labé , Pernette du Guillet , Olivier de Magny and Pontus de Tyard . Scève's Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu - composed of 449 ten syllable ten line poems ( dizains ) and published with numerous engraved emblems - is exemplary in its use of amorous paradoxes and (often obscure) allegory to describe
7300-596: The styles of these artists are an obvious proof of this. The artists involved with this new movement, according to Apollinaire, included Pablo Picasso (who represented Apollinaire in his Three Musicians painting), Georges Braque , Jean Metzinger , Albert Gleizes , Robert Delaunay , Fernand Léger , and Henri Le Fauconnier . By 1912 others had joined the Cubists: Jacques Villon , Marcel Duchamp , Raymond Duchamp-Villon , Francis Picabia , Juan Gris , and Roger de La Fresnaye , among them. The term Orphism
7400-506: The suffering of a lover. Poetry at the end of the century was profoundly marked by the civil wars : pessimism, dourness and a call for retreat from the world predominate (as in Jean de Sponde ). However, the horrors of the war were also to inspire one Protestant poet, Agrippa d'Aubigné , to write a brilliant poem on the conflict: Les Tragiques . Because of the new conception of "l'honnête homme" or "the honest or upright man", poetry became one of
7500-793: The surrealists tried to reveal the workings of the unconscious mind. The group championed previous writers they saw as radical ( Arthur Rimbaud , the Comte de Lautréamont , Baudelaire ) and promoted an anti-bourgeois philosophy (particularly with regards to sex and politics) which would later lead most of them to join the communist party. Other writers associated with surrealism include: Jean Cocteau , René Crevel , Jacques Prévert , Jules Supervielle , Benjamin Péret , Philippe Soupault , Pierre Reverdy , Antonin Artaud (who revolutionized theater), Henri Michaux and René Char . The surrealist movement would continue to be
7600-580: The theft of the Mona Lisa and a number of Egyptian statuettes from the Louvre , but released him a week later. The theft of the statues had been committed in 1907 by a former secretary of Apollinaire, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, who had recently returned one of the stolen statues to the French newspaper the Paris-Journal . Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who had bought Iberian statues from Pieret, and who
7700-465: The three successive phases of cubism." After a short stay in Paris, he traveled to New York, arriving on 11 December 1911. Between 6–8 April 1912, he wrote his long poem, Les Pâques à New York (Easter in New York), his first important contribution to modern literature. He signed it for the first time with the name Blaise Cendrars. In the summer of 1912, Cendrars returned to Paris, convinced that poetry
7800-455: The traditional forms. The new direction of poetry is fully apparent in the work of the humanist Jacques Peletier du Mans . In 1541, he published the first French translation of Horace 's "Ars poetica" and in 1547 he published a collection of poems "Œuvres poétiques", which included translations from the first two cantos of Homer 's Odyssey and the first book of Virgil 's Georgics , twelve Petrarchian sonnets , three Horacian odes and
7900-557: The troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic (as well as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name) tendencies are apparent in the Roman de Fauvel in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church filled with medieval motets, lais , rondeaux and other new secular forms of poetry and music (mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry who would coin
8000-410: The upper right corner, and a painted silhouette in orange of the Eiffel Tower in the lower left. Cendrars called the work the first "simultaneous poem". Soon after, it was exhibited as a work of art in its own right and continues to be shown at exhibitions to this day. This intertwining of poetry and painting was related to Robert Delaunay 's and other artists' experiments in proto- expressionism . At
8100-510: The use of amorous paradoxes), Italian poets in the French court (like Luigi Alamanni ), Italian Neo-platonism and humanism , and the rediscovery of certain Greek poets (such as Pindar and Anacreon ) would profoundly modify the French tradition. In this respect, the French poets Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais are transitional figures: they are credited with some of the first sonnets in French, but their poems continue to employ many of
8200-735: The works of Maurice Blanchot . The unique poetry of Francis Ponge exerted a strong influence on a variety of writers (both phenomenologists and those from the group " Tel Quel "). The later poets Claude Royet-Journoud , Anne-Marie Albiach , Emmanuel Hocquard , and to a degree Jean Daive , describe a shift from Heidegger to Ludwig Wittgenstein and a reevaluation of Mallarmé's notion of fiction and theatricality; these poets were also influenced by certain English-language modern poets (such as Ezra Pound , Louis Zukofsky , William Carlos Williams , and George Oppen ) along with certain American postmodern and avant garde poets loosely grouped around
8300-539: The world of the French intellectuals, summed up in his Farewell to Painters (1926) and the last section of L'homme foudroyé (1944), after which he began to make numerous trips to South America ("while others were going to Moscow", as he writes in that chapter). It was during this second half of his career that he began to concentrate on novels, short stories, and, near the end and just after World War II, on his magnificent poetic-autobiographical tetralogy, beginning with L'homme foudroyé . Cendrars continued to be active in
8400-478: Was a Polish-Lithuanian noblewoman born near Navahrudak , Grodno Governorate (former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, present-day Belarus ). His maternal grandfather participated in the 1863 uprising against occupying Russia and had to emigrate when the uprising failed. Apollinaire's father is unknown but may have been Francesco Costantino Camillo Flugi d'Aspermont (born 1835), a Graubünden aristocrat who disappeared early from Apollinaire's life. Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont
8500-629: Was a nephew of Conradin Flugi d'Aspermont (1787–1874), a poet who wrote in Ladin Putèr (an official language dialect of Switzerland spoken in Upper Engadin ), and perhaps also of the Minnesänger Oswald von Wolkenstein (born c. 1377, died 2 August 1445; see Les ancêtres Grisons du poète Guillaume Apollinaire at Geneanet ). Apollinaire eventually moved from Rome to Paris in 1900 and became one of
8600-427: Was a student and vagabond whose two poetic "testaments" or "wills" are celebrated for their portrayal of the urban and university environment of Paris and their scabrous wit, satire and verbal puns. The image of Villon as vagabond poet seems to have gained almost mythic status in the 16th century, and this figure would be championed by poetic rebels of the 19th century and 20th centuries (see Poète maudit ). Poetry in
8700-550: Was also brought in for questioning in the theft of the Mona Lisa , but he was also exonerated. The theft of the Mona Lisa was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia , an Italian house painter who acted alone and was only caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence. Apollinaire wrote the preface for the first Cubist exposition outside of Paris; VIII Salon des Indépendants , Brussels, 1911. In an open-handed preface to
8800-401: Was an early exponent of Modernism in European poetry with his works: The Legend of Novgorode (1907), Les Pâques à New York (1912), La Prose du Transsibérien et la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), Séquences (1913), La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916), Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918), J'ai tué (1918), and Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919). In many ways, he was
8900-698: Was based on photographic impressions, cinematic effects of montage and rapid changes of imagery, and scenes of great emotional force, often with the power of a hallucination. These qualities, which also inform his prose, are already evident in Easter in New York and in his best known and even longer poem The Transsiberian, with its scenes of revolution and the Far East in flames in the Russo-Japanese war ("The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion / tortured by
9000-423: Was close to Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and the artists Chagall and Léger, and his work has similarities with both surrealism and cubism. Poetry in the post-war period followed a number of interlinked paths, most notably deriving from surrealism (such as with the early work of René Char ), or from philosophical and phenomenological concerns stemming from Heidegger , Friedrich Hölderlin , existentialism,
9100-506: Was coined by Apollinaire at the Salon de la Section d'Or in 1912, referring to the works of Robert Delaunay and František Kupka . During his lecture at the Section d'Or exhibit Apollinaire presented three of Kupka's abstract works as perfect examples of pure painting , as anti-figurative as music. In Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques (1913) Apollinaire described Orphism as "the art of painting new totalities with elements that
9200-507: Was eventually lost. Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists , juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. In 1913, Apollinaire published the essay Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques on the Cubist painters,
9300-435: Was frequent with gentlemen in the service of a noble or the king. Poetry was the chief form of 17th century theater: the vast majority of scripted plays were written in verse (see "Theater" below). Poetry was used in satires ( Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux is famous for his "Satires" (1666)) and in epics (inspired by the Renaissance epic tradition and by Tasso ) like Jean Chapelain 's La Pucelle . Although French poetry during
9400-551: Was his last work before he suffered a stroke in 1957. He died in 1961. His ashes are held at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre . In New York in 1911, Cendrars married his first wife, Féla Poznańska, who was Jewish and of Russo-Polish extraction. They had three children: Rémy (an airman killed in WW2), Odilon and Miriam Gilou-Cendrars who was active with the Free French in London during World War II. She
9500-592: Was his vocation. With Emil Szittya , an anarchist writer, he started the journal Les hommes nouveaux , also the name of the press where he published Les Pâques à New York and Séquences . He became acquainted with the international array of artists and writers in Paris, such as Chagall , Léger , Survage , Suter , Modigliani , Csaky , Archipenko , Jean Hugo and Robert Delaunay . Most notably, he encountered Guillaume Apollinaire . The two poets influenced each other's work. Cendrars's poem Les Pâques à New York influenced Apollinaire's poem Zone . Cendrars's style
9600-633: Was interrupted by World War I. When it began, he and the Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists to join the French army. He joined the French Foreign Legion . He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915, he was in the line at Frise (La Grenouillère and Bois de la Vache). He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée (The severed hand) and J'ai tué (I have killed), and it
9700-523: Was little used until the Parnassians brought it back into favor, and the sonnet would subsequently find its most significant practitioner in Charles Baudelaire . The traditional French sonnet form was however significantly modified by Baudelaire, who used 32 different forms of sonnet with non-traditional rhyme patterns to great effect in his Les Fleurs du mal . Guillaume Apollinaire radicalized
9800-723: Was not only the first Cubist portrait, according to Apollinaire, but it was also the first great portrait of the poet exhibited in public, prior to others by Louis Marcoussis , Amedeo Modigliani , Mikhail Larionov and Picasso. In 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the Cubist movement soon to be known as the Section d'Or . The opening address of the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or—the most important pre-World War I Cubist exhibition—was given by Apollinaire. On 7 September 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of aiding and abetting
9900-559: Was so taken with the simplicity of the décor that he was inspired to write the poems published as De Outremer à indigo (From ultramarine to indigo). He stayed with Eugenia in her house in Biarritz , in a room decorated with murals by Picasso. At this time, he drove an old Alfa Romeo which had been colour-coordinated by Georges Braque . Cendrars became an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse ; his writings were considered
10000-460: Was the outstanding genius of the Romantic School and its recognized leader. He was prolific alike in poetry, drama, and fiction. Other writers associated with the movement were the austere and pessimistic Alfred de Vigny , Théophile Gautier a devotee of beauty and creator of the " Art for art's sake " movement, and Alfred de Musset , who best exemplifies romantic melancholy. By the middle of
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