The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry

First published in 1958, this collection introduced an indispensable corpus of Western poetry to countless American college students, Francophiles, and would-be poets — among them Patti Smith, whose vocation was formed, she says, by reading this book. The poetic and cultural tradition forged by the Symbolist poets — Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Appollinaire, and others — reverberated throughout the avant-garde and counter-cultures of the twentieth century. Modernism, Surrealism, Abstract Ex…