Stéphane Mallarmé, pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.
Émile Nelligan was a Canadian Symbolist poet from Montreal who wrote in French. Even though he stopped writing poetry after being institutionalized at the age of 19, Nelligan remains an iconic figure in Quebec culture and was considered by Edmund Wilson to be the greatest Canadian poet in any language.
Tristan Corbière, born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 29. He was a French poet, close to Symbolism, and a figure of the "cursed poet".
Jean Richepin was a French poet, novelist and dramatist.
Évariste Desiré de Forges, vicomte de Parny was a French poet.
Illuminations is an incomplete suite of prose poems by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, first published partially in La Vogue, a Paris literary review, in May–June 1886. The texts were reprinted in book form in October 1886 by Les publications de La Vogue under the title Les Illuminations proposed by the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's former lover. In his preface, Verlaine explained that the title was based on the English word illuminations, in the sense of coloured plates, and a sub-title that Rimbaud had already given the work. Verlaine dated its composition between 1873 and 1875.
Suite bergamasque is a piano suite by Claude Debussy. He began composing it around 1890, at the age of 28, but significantly revised it just before its 1905 publication. The popularity of the 3rd movement, "Clair de lune", has made it one of the composer's most famous works for piano, as well as one of the most famous musical pieces of all time.
A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death, are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit.
French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.
"Le Bateau ivre" is a 100-line verse-poem written in 1871 by Arthur Rimbaud. The poem describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narrative saturated with vivid imagery and symbolism.
19th-century French literature concerns the developments in French literature during a dynamic period in French history that saw the rise of Democracy and the fitful end of Monarchy and Empire. The period covered spans the following political regimes: Napoleon Bonaparte's Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–1814), the Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X (1814–1830), the July Monarchy under Louis Philippe d'Orléans (1830–1848), the Second Republic (1848–1852), the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852–1871), and the first decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940).
Germain Marie Bernard Nouveau (1851–1920) was a French poet associated with the symbolist movement.
Charles van Lerberghe was a Belgian author who wrote in French and was particularly identified with the symbolist movement. The growing atheism and anticlerical stance evident in his later work made it popular among those who challenged establishment norms at the start of the 20th century.
A Season in Hell is an extended poem in prose written and published in 1873 by French writer Arthur Rimbaud. It is the only work that was published by Rimbaud himself. The book had a considerable influence on later artists and poets, including the Surrealists.
Verlaine et Rimbaud is an album by Léo Ferré. It was released in 1964 by Barclay Records. This album is one of the first studio double albums in popular music history.
Arturo Borja Pérez was an Ecuadorian poet who was part of a group known as the "Generación decapitada". He was the first in the group to excel as a modernist poet. He did not produce a lot of poetry, but the small amount of poetry he produced showed great quality. He published twenty poems in a book titled La flauta de ónix, and six other poems were published posthumously. The group is called "decapitada", or decapitated, because all its members committed suicide at a young age.
Paterne Berrichon - the pseudonym of Pierre-Eugène Dufour, born 10 January 1855 at Issoudun and died 30 July 1922 at La Rochefoucauld - was a French poet, painter, sculptor and designer. He is best known as husband of Isabelle Rimbaud, and the brother-in-law and publisher of Arthur Rimbaud.
Fêtes Galantes is a cycle of six mélodies composed by Claude Debussy to poems by Paul Verlaine. It consists of two books of three songs. The songs were composed over several years, and were premiered in 1904.
