Jacques (Henri Marie) Prevert | Biography

Jacques Prévert exemplified the twentieth-century "popular" poet. His work expressed the joys and frustrations of the average man contending with the forces of oppression that seek to overwhelm him. His poetry often takes the form of a scathing attack on organized religion, complacency, lies, social injustice, false ideologies, and war. Colored by the interwar years and their aftermath, Prévert denounced the totalitarianism of Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and what he saw as their henchmen--the intellectual and right-wing establishment of the Third and Fourth Republics, the Pope and the Catholic Church, and all those who would seek to prevent the man in the street from achieving personal fulfillment. His is a vitriolic attack against the cynical, hypocritical, jingoistic, nationalist, capitalist, conformist, militarist society in which he lived, but his negativism is tempered by his defense of the downtrodden and oppressed, often represented by children, animals, and birds.

Because Prévert...
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