10 of the Best French Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

French poetry is among the most romantic, the most innovative, and the most influential of all poetry. French poets – possibly influenced by the example of the American trailblazer, Walt Whitman – pioneered vers libre or ‘free verse’ in the late nineteenth century, while some of the most avant-garde poetry written at the beginning of the twentieth century was written in French.

Below, we have selected some of the most iconic, celebrated, and influential poems by French poets, or poets writing in the French language. The poems gathered here range from the medieval to the modern, the Romantic to the experimental, and much else.

1. François Villon, ‘The Ballad of the Ladies of Yore’.

Villon (c. 1431-63) is regarded as the best-known French poet of the late Middle Ages, and perhaps even the best-known medieval poet from France, his readership eclipsing that of the earlier troubadours.

In a short life which included various brushes with the law, Villon got the poetry bug and wrote some of the most influential poetry of the age. His reputation lasted well into the modern era, too: both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound quote from his work in their poetry. The famous line ‘where are the snows of yesteryear?’ also originates with Villon.

This poem, ‘The Ballad of the Ladies of Yore’, contains that well-known question, and gives an idea of Villon’s style and subject-matter.

2. Louise-Victorine Ackermann, ‘Hebe’.

Ackermann (1813-90) was a female poet associated with the Parnassian school, which is sometimes viewed as a forerunner to the Symbolists (although Symbolism was as much a reaction against the Parnassians as it was a development). Parnassian poetry is characterised by its strong use of traditional verse forms; in some ways, it is a sort of belated neoclassicism.

In ancient Greek myth, Hebe was a sort of female equivalent of Ganymede, cupbearer to the gods on Mount Olympus. But she was also a goddess in her own right, especially associated with youth and with being in one’s prime. So this poem, about Hebe’s departure, is about the passing of one’s youth and prime.

3. Alfred de Musset, ‘Song of Fortunio’.

The poet, dramatist, and novelist Alfred de Musset (1810-57) grew up reading old romances and staging little plays inspired by them, and he is a romantic – and Romantic – through and through, as this short quatrain poem, a ‘chanson’ or song of love, demonstrates.

4. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Spleen’.

Baudelaire (1821-67) was arguably the single most influential French poet of the nineteenth century.

Inspired by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire pioneered a new kind of poetry – he is often associated with Symbolism – which didn’t shy away from the more ‘diseased’ side of Romanticism: his best-known collection, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), translates as ‘the flowers of evil’. The flowers of Romanticism have gone off and are rotten.

In this poem, Baudelaire summons that extended meaning of the word ‘spleen’: denoting the sense of melancholic ennui which the speaker is feeling. Poems like this would later influence decadent poets, in both France and Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century.

5. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘A Dice Throw’.

Alongside the vers libre experiments of the French poet Gustave Kahn, some French poets at the end of the nineteenth century were playing around with verse form, and this example of free verse from Stephane Mallarmé is somewhat different, and can be regarded as an early example of concrete poetry.

The poem was published in 1897, and uses much blank space between the words and lines of the verse. Follow the link above to read an excerpt from the longer (20-page) poem.

6. Paul Verlaine, ‘Moonlight’.

Verlaine (1844-96), according to Dorothy Parker’s witty play on words, was ‘always chasing Rimbauds’. His love affair with Arthur Rimbaud (of whom more in a moment) threatens to eclipse his poetry, which is among the best, and most famous, French decadent poetry of the late nineteenth century.

‘Moonlight’ was titled ‘Clair de lune’ in the original French, and Verlaine’s poem gave its name to the well-known piece for piano by the composer Claude Debussy. The poem describes the ‘sad beauty’ of the moonlight, but its main focus is the addressee’s ‘soul’, whose soul mingles with that beautiful yet melancholy moonlight.

7. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘The Drunken Boat’.

Rimbaud (1854-91), who was romantically involved with Verlaine, and this poem, among his most famous, shows his artistic affinities with that other poet: once again, we have a description of someone’s soul, in this case the poet’s own, but his soul is figured as a boat adrift on the seas after all of its passengers have been killed.

8. Paul Valéry, ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’.

Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (1871-1945) famously observed that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. He himself famously abandoned poetry for some twenty years, although the poems he wrote when he took up his pen again are some of the greatest French poems of the first half of the twentieth century.

‘The Graveyard by the Sea’ (1920), perhaps his best-known poem, is, unsurprisingly, a meditation on death. But through ruminating on this gloomy topic, the poet emerges with a new-found enthusiasm for living. It’s also a nature poem, which, like many of the greatest poems of the Romantics, uses an encounter with the natural world to prompt inward reflection.

9. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Zone’.

The Calligrammes (1918) of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), who died after he contracted Spanish flu, are among the most notable early twentieth-century examples of concrete poetry. Apollinaire experimented with form in numerous ways, writing poems in the shape of a necktie, a fountain and raindrops running down a window, among others.

But this poem, ‘Zone’, is a little more ambitious, and might be regarded as a precursor to even longer poems about the modern city, such as Hope Mirrlees’ Paris (1920), which was surely influenced by Apollinaire, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).

Written in 1913, ‘Zone’ is a free-verse extravaganza which captures the experience of modern-day Paris, with the sound of aeroplanes and the sights of the city, advertisements and the bustle of the capital.

10. Aimé Césaire, ‘The Woman and the Flame’.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was born on Martinique, part of the French Caribbean, and was an influential figure in the Négritude movement in Francophone literature (indeed, he even coined the word).

As well as the book-length poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (‘return to my native land’), he also wrote shorter words such as ‘The Woman and the Flame’, which bears the influence of modernist poetry with its complex imagery and use of free verse, as the poet reaches for numerous images in an attempt to describe the fiery, wild, tempestuous nature of womanhood.