Jacques Prévert

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Prévert, Jacques (1900-77). French poet. Set to music by Kosma, interpreted by Yves Montand, learnt by heart in schools, dissected by academics, Prévert's poems have a uniquely important place in 20th-c. French culture. His is a poetry of the man in the street—essentially oral, often sentimental, disdainful of the high and mighty, respectful towards the underdog. Anarchic and playful, his spirit is pre-political, although the sketches he wrote during his participation in the agit-prop Groupe Octobre, some performed in factories in 1936, and his delightful script for Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, are quintessential expressions of the Popular Front ethos. A fringe member of the Surrealist group from 1925, he soon joined the dissidents along with his friends from the ‘Groupe de la rue du Château’ (Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel, Queneau).

PrÉvert began writing poems in the early 1930s. However, long before the publication of his first collection (Paroles, 1946) he had made his name as writer of film-scripts: Drôle de drame (1937), Quai des brumes (1938), Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), all directed by Marcel Carné and displaying a mixture of realism and poetry allied with a strong sense of character. The great success of Paroles after the war led Prévert to write more poetry (Spectacle, 1951; La Pluie et le beau temps, 1955) mostly of a similar kind, dominated by clever punning, a sense of the marvellous, and an unerring feel for the quality of everyday life.

[Michael Sheringham]

Quotes:

"Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it."

"An orange on the table, your dress on the rug, and you in my bed, sweet present of the present, cool of night, warmth of my life."

"When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today."