Modern French Poets on Poetry

This anthology originally published in 1961 is of an unusual kind: a series of pronouncements on poetry by the great French poets of the last hundred years, arranged in a way which gives them a purposeful sequence, and linked by Professor Gibson’s explanatory comment. It thus gave as no other book of the time did an ars poetica for modern poetry. Though it is in French, it is relevant to English because to place for instance T. S. Eliot’s early work in a historical perspective, it must be related to the tradition of French poetry and critical writing. Professor Gibson shows what a rich tradition it was: there is hardly an important French poet who was not also deeply concerned with the nature and implications of his own work and of all poetry as well.