I created this node because I noticed that there wasn't one and I wanted a place to categorize French Poetry that have so far been noded. I did this to try to help out The Everything Anthology of Poetry. If you have noded any french poetry or know of any, please /msg me and I will immediately put it on the list. Don't forget to give me the name of the poem and the name of the author.


French Poetry and Authors

Guillaume Apollinaire
Gala
Le Pont Mirabeau (french)

Louis Aragon

Antonin Artaud

Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs Du Mal
A Voyage to Cythera
Beacons
Beauty
Dawn of the Spirit
Destruction
Hymn to Beauty
Irreparable
l'albatros (french)
Lesbos
I Worship You
L'Invitation au voyage (french)
Moesta Et Errabunda
Morning Twilight
Song of Autumn
The Enemy
The Swan
Andre Breton
Postman Cheval
The Spectral Attitudes
Rene Char
To...
Robert Desnos
A Shooting Star
Cascade
Dove in the Arch
Epitaph
If You Only Knew
I Have Dreamed of You So Much
No, Love is Not Dead
Of the Flower of Love and the Wandering Horses
Sorrows of Love
The Landscape
The Ring of Stars
Jean de la Fontaine
The Fox and the Crow (french)
Victor Hugo
Words In The Shadow
Louise Labe
Long-Felt Desires
I Flee the City, Temples, and Each Place
Stéphane Mallarmé
Pour un tombeau d'Anatole (french)
Album Leaf
Jacques Prevert
Chanson
L'automne
Le Droit Chemin
Arthur Rimbaud
Aube (french)
Le Dormeur du Val (french)
Ma Boheme (french)
Rêvé pour l'hiver (french)
Sensation (french)
Song of the Tallest Tower
Pierre de Ronsard
I Want to Be Inside You

Chretien De Troyes

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
A Memory
My Room
Paul Verlaine
A Charles Baudelaire (french)
Autumn Song
Il pleure dans mon coeur (french)
Tears Fall in My Heart

Traditional French poetry shares some of the terminology of English poetry, but because of language peculiarities and historical developments, differs from it in many respects. The most obvious difference is that French, not having the tonic accent of the Germanic languages, but a weak final accent, ignores things like iambic pentameter, since there is no alternance of weak and strong to count. This is best illustrated with these examples (accent indicated by italics):

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! (Shakespeare, Richard III).

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers (Baudelaire, "Correspondances").

In the English example, the line is in iambic pentameter (a particularly striking example). The French example is an alexandrine, a line of 12 syllables, which is considered the French verse par excellence, just as iambic pentameter is in English (which the French would call a décasyllabe).

This gives a flowing, liquid quality to French poetry (to anglophone ears, anyway). It does not mean there is no rhythm to a French poem, but it is not structured by intrinsic word rhythm.

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