The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

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introduction

In each of the countries where colonial rule was overthrown, indepen-
dence brought its own problems. After Quebec declared cultural inde-
pendence from anglophone Canada in 1977 with the passage of controver-
sial Bill 101 (which made French the o≈cial language of the province),
anglophone businesses relocated outside the province. In addition, Que-
bec’s language and firmly Catholic tradition stood out more starkly than
it had before against the Protestant majority in other parts of the country;
freed from English, the Québecois language quickly returned to its native
state. The successors to the famous École de littérature de Montréal are
two celebrated Canadian writers, Anne Hébert and Gaston Miron.π

Organization

This anthology is divided into six chronological parts, reflecting
major trends in French poetry during the twentieth century. Within the
divisions, poems appear under an alphabetical listing by poet. Poets’ dates
of birth, not the dates their first books were published, determine the
placement of their work. In the short essays preceding each of these
sections, poets are discussed by generation—though, when speaking of
contemporaries, the discussions are not strictly limited by birthdates. The
present organization highlights six crucial pressure points in modern
French poetry. They are the emergence of Dada in 1916; the changeover of
the journal La Révolution surréaliste to Le Surréalisme au service de la
révolution in 1930; the end of the war and André Breton’s return from his
exile in New York to France in December of 1945, along with a number
of other Surrealists; and then Bréton’s death in 1966, the same year
the journal L’Éphémère was founded by Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin,
Louis-René des Forêts, and Gaetan Picon. The penultimate division ends
with 1980, the year Marguerite Yourcenar became the first female member
of the Académie française—a major event, as important, certainly, as the
publication, in 1975, of the first issue of L’Arc to be devoted to a woman
(that issue carried the title ‘‘Simone de Beauvoir et la lutte des femmes,’’ or
‘‘Simone de Beauvoir and the Struggle of Women’’).
Because poetic endeavors between the 1960s and the current era feel so
intensely present, and to some extent continuous, my initial temptation,
in the ultimate section, was to separate these forty or so years into two
parts, alphabetically by poet: A through K and L through Y. But 1980
stood out for another reason besides Yourcenar’s admission to the Aca-
démie française. That watershed year marks the beginning of an interna-
tional exchange between French and American poets—the publication of
Jacques Roubaud and Michel Deguy’s anthology Vingt poètes américains. I
have therefore chosen 1981 as the starting point for contemporary poets at
the end of the twentieth century.