French male poets

Jacques_Vaché

Jacques Vaché (7 September 1895 – 6 January 1919) was a friend of André Breton, the founder of surrealism. Vaché was one of the chief inspirations behind the Surrealist movement. As Breton said:

"En littérature, je me suis successivement épris de Rimbaud, de Jarry, d'Apollinaire, de Nouveau, de Lautréamont, mais c'est à Jacques Vaché que je dois le plus"("In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most")He was born on 7 September 1895 in Lorient, France, and died in a hotel room in Nantes on 6 January 1919 from an overdose of opium. Alongside him lay the naked body of another French soldier. André Breton believed his death to be a suicide. He was known for his indifference and for wearing a monocle.

Pêr-Jakez_Helias

Pêr-Jakez Helias, baptised Pierre-Jacques Hélias, nom de plume Pierre-Jakez Hélias (1914–1995) was a Breton stage actor, journalist, author, poet, and writer for radio who worked in the French and Breton languages. For many years he directed a weekly radio programme in the Breton language and co-founded a summer festival at Quimper which became the Festival de Cornouaille.

Jean-Pierre_Duprey

Jean-Pierre Duprey (1 January 1930, in Rouen – 2 October 1959, in Paris) was a French poet and sculptor, one of the modern examples of a poète maudit (accursed poet).
Duprey said "I, I shouldn't have got stuck in this galaxy!" André Breton, fascinated by the darkness and imagery in Duprey's poetry, invited the author to Paris in 1948. Duprey's books are not a celebration of death, neither do they find comfort in thinking about it. All questions asked in the poems of his last book The End and the Means (1970) are left unanswered, but their author found a way somewhere "beyond" (Jouffroy, 1970, quoted in ).
He had a sense for scandals, too. One day he went to the grave of the Unknown Soldier by the Arc de Triomphe and urinated on the eternal flame for which he was arrested and beaten in the jail; later also taken to a mental hospital. Between 1951 and 1958 he did not write and concentrated on working on sculptures. He wrote his final book in 1959 and upon completion, he asked his wife to send the manuscript to Breton. When she returned from the post office, she found him dead; he had hanged himself in his studio.
Three days before his death, he said calmly to a friend: "I am allergic to this planet".

Christian_Bobin

Christian Bobin (24 April 1951 – 24 November 2022) was a French author and poet.
Bobin received the 1993 Prix des Deux Magots for the book Le Très-Bas (translated into English in 1997 by Michael Kohn and published under two titles: The Secret of Francis of Assisi: A Meditation and The Very Lowly).

René_Tavernier_(poet)

René Tavernier (21 May 1915 – 16 December 1989) was a French poet and philosopher.
Tavernier published his first poems before World War II in the New French Review, and was immediately noticed by Jean Wahl. In turn, this brought him recognition by Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. A friend of Vladimir Jankélévitch, he was held at Drancy internment camp. After escaping, he fled to the United States.
Joining writers and journalists during the war led him to Lyon in the neighborhood where he directed Montchat Confluences - A journal on "Literature and Arts" - founded by Jacques Aubenque between July 1941 and 1943. It is in this review, which included as the "original purpose" to "bring together writers and ideas from diverse backgrounds in the service of humanism" that he published the poems of Pierre Emmanuel, Max Jacob, Henri Michaux, Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, one of whose poems was also the cause of the suspension of the magazine for a few months. Firmly committed to the Resistance, René Tavernier organized clandestine meetings at his home until the end of 1943 with Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon.
His son was the film director Bertrand Tavernier.

Joseph_d'Arbaud

Joseph d'Arbaud (4 October 1874 – 2 March 1950) was a French poet and writer from Provence. He was a leading figure in the Provençal Revival, a literary movement of the nineteenth century.