An influential social thinker, the late Richard Harvey Brown was professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication, published by Yale University Press.

During the 20th Century, France was home to many of the world’s greatest poets. This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. Let Paul Auster guide you through some of the best poetry that 20th century France has to offer. “Indispensable . . . a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention . . . To my knowledge, no current anthology is as full and as deftly edited.”—Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review “One of the freshest and most exciting books of poetry to appear in a long while . . . Paul Auster has provided the best possible point of entry into this century's most influential body of poetry.”—Geoffrey O'Brien, The Village Voice

A selection of modern French poems with critical commentary, glossary of literary terms, biographies and bibliography.

DIVAn eagerly awaited anthology of recent poetry and prose by the celebrated French poet Yves Bonnefoy/div

Whether viewed as an influence or in and for themselves, the Symbolists are a tantalizing group. Paralleling similar movements in art and music, their intensely personal poetry leans more heavily on oblique suggestions and evocation than on overt statement. It sets its perceptions, intuitive and nonrational, squarely against intellectual and scientific thinking—and this with a music that is flexible, intrepid, and subtle, sometimes even dissonant and jazzy. But the poetry itself is the movement's best definition. Here with bilingual text en face, an introduction, and illuminating notes, are some forty carefully selected poems of that movement. They range from the remote beginnings in Nerval and Baudelaire, through the humor and irony of Corbière and Laforgue, to the technical brilliance of Valéry, who died as recently as 1945. For those who wish an overall view of the movement, this is a generous sampling.

'Selected Lyrics' presents a short list of nineteenth-century French poets to be studied with Théophile Gautier.

Modernism and Authority presents a provocative new take on the early paintings of Pablo Picasso and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Palermo argues that references to theology and traditional Christian iconography in the works of Picasso and Apollinaire are not mere symbolic gestures; rather, they are complex responses to the symbolist art and poetry of figures important to them, including Paul Gauguin, Charles Morice, and Santiago Rusi–ol. The young Picasso and his contemporaries experienced the challenges of modernity as an attempt to reflect on the lost relation to authority. For the symbolists, art held authority by revealing something compellingÑsomething to which audiences must respond lest they lose claim to their own moral authority. Instead of the total transformation of the reader or viewer that symbolist creators envision, Picasso and Apollinaire imagine a divided self, responding only partially or ambivalently to the work of artÕs call. Navigating these problems of symbolist art and poetry entails considering the nature of the work of art and of oneÕs response to it, the modern subjectÕs place in history, and the relevance of historical truth to our methodological choices in the present.