Poems That Sing by French Masters: Fifteen Great French Poets and Their Verses of Life, Love, and Loss--Original Text with English Translations

The author, a professor of French at California State University, Los Angeles, has chosen fifteen poets as representative of their times and their stature in French poetry, remaining as faithful as he could to the particular schemes of rime and meter, as well as the sound play, imagery, and meaning of each poem..

Three themes stand out in them: the themes of life's beauties; the emotions of love, paternal or romantic; and the pain of loss. There are also in these poems a variety of parallel or sub-themes, as, for example, aging in Ronsard and Desbordes‑Valmore, patriotism in Du Bellay, exoticism and "correspondences" in Baudelaire, and war in Rimbaud and Aragon. Most of the poems were taken from Henri Clouard and Robert Leggewie's Anthologie de la littérature française, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press: 1975).