In this excerpt, Vitz examines patterns of erotic and gustatory metaphors to establish the major contrasts in Villon's work. For Vitz, “contamination” describes the way in which metaphor seems to work by proximity in Villon's poetry, as symbolic connotations seem to seep from one line to the next.

In this essay, the author reviews Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist interpretations of the legend of Villon, arguing that such legends have been detrimental to readings of Villon's most famous poem. With comparisons to Le Roman de la Rose and the genre of hagiography, Uitti demonstrates how Villon illustrates issues of marginality and power in the context of Medieval France.

In this essay, first presented at a conference of Villon scholars in 1996, Regalado argues that instances of misquotation in Villon's work are not errors of memory, but intentional poetic devices. Regalado proposes further that the faux-errors help create the wise-fool persona of the poems' narrators.

In this essay, originally published in 1874, Stevenson celebrates Villon's writing style while condemning both his life and his choice of subjects.

In this excerpt, Fox concerns himself with Villon's often curious word order and phrasing, which give the impression of realistic thought and speech patterns while retaining poetic qualities. Fox also examines Villon's expansive vocabulary.

In this essay, first presented at Oxford in 1996, Vitz traces Villon's use of liturgical language and themes, noting that modern scholars wrongly tend to dismiss Villon's serious spiritual concerns. Instead, Vitz argues, Villon is deeply concerned with eschatological questions, in both the Lais and the Testament.

In this excerpt, Hunt examines the methods by which Villon calls into question the authority of his narrator in Le Testament, including his asides to the “scribe,” his allusions to other sources, and his use of irony.

In the first excerpt, Fein informally theorizes a historically aware reader-response approach to Villon's Testament drawing from the work of literary scholars Stanley Fish and Hans R. Jauss, establishes an identity for Villon's contemporary readership, and discusses Villon's deft maneuvering between obscure historical detail and universal themes. The second excerpted chapter compares Villon's Testament to the work of his patron Charles d'Orléans, discussing the rol...

In this essay, Sargent-Baur examines possible influences for Villon's rhetorical style of addressing potential benefactors, especially those Greek and Roman models Villon would have studied in school. The author considers Villon's Testament as well as several of his Poèmes variés.

In this essay, Freeman contends that the critical tendency to interpret Villon as a precursor to Romantic poets has caused scholars to overlook the importance of money and poverty in Villon's oeuvre. Focusing on Le Lais and Le Testament, Freeman suggests that the modern view of the Romantic starving artist cannot take into account Villon's real desire and need for material security.

In this essay, Cholakian discusses Villon's widespread use of names in his Testament, suggesting that they serve to disempower those who are named and empower the narrator. The intense self-referentiality of the poem, he argues, further emphasizes Villon's use of naming as a means of asserting selfhood against dominating Others.

In this excerpt, Fein turns to the conclusion of Villon's Testament, suggesting that behind its sarcasm and apparent celebration of dissipation the poem reveals an enthusiasm for life and offers a serious meditation on both humanity and eternity.

In this excerpt, Fein details the groups of people Villon addresses in his earlier mock-testament, many of which reappear in The Testament. Fein demonstrates the variety of tones—playful, ironic, cruel, sympathetic—Villon uses in portraying the various classes of society.

Below, Payne discusses Villon's ability to portray common people and events of 15th-century Paris in a clear and realistic manner, making him "the first great poet of the people."

In the following essay, Frank studies the believability of what she considers Villon's feigned penitence.

In this essay, Lacy takes exception to the standard critical practice of devaluing the Lais—seeing it as trivial or as merely an early draft for Le Testament. Lacy suggests that the habit of imagining that the first-person narrator of Villon's poems is Villon himself leads readers to overlook the more serious themes of the light-hearted earlier work.

In this essay, Hayes focuses on the theme of death and dying to demonstrate how Villon wrote “city” poetry, in contrast to the courtly poetry of the aristocracy. In addition to literary analysis, Hayes draws from the culture of Medieval France and the art of the late Gothic era to establish Villon's place in the development of a more popular literature.

In this essay, Harrison offers a counterpoint to the common scholarly view of Villon as an enemy of authority. Harrison delineates several types of authority present in Villon's works to argue that Villon did not view all authority equally and that Villon himself had a sense of his own authority as a literary master.

Stevenson was a Scottish novelist and poet. His novels Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) were considered popular literary classics upon publication and firmly established his reputation as an inventive stylist and riveting storyteller. Stevenson is also noted for his understanding of youth, which is evident both in his early "boy's novels," as they were known, and in his much-loved A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). In the following exc...

Below, Tukey Harrison comments on the respect for authority displayed in Villon's poetry.

In this essay, Peckham considers the mix of high and low—spiritual and crude—in Villon's Testament as a sign of the transformation of the narrator that takes place within the poem.

Brereton is an English educator who has written extensively on French literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Here, in a revised version of an essay originally published in 1956, he praises Villon's poetic technique of combining the traditional ballade form with the modern tendency to write about highly personal subject matter.

An American poet and critic, Pound is regarded as one of the most innovative and influential figures in twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry. He is chiefly renowned for his ambitious poetry cycle the Cantos, which he revised and enlarged throughout much of his life, and his series of satirical poems Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920). In the following essay, Pound analyzes Villon's particular method of writing poetry, comparing his approach to those of various literary movements and medieval and renaiss...

In this excerpt from the introduction to his translation of Villon's poems, Kinnell contrasts Villon's Lais with his Testament as forms of mock-testaments, arguing that the later poem, despite its frequently comic tone, offers a very serious and unflinching view of death and mortality.

In the following essay, Sargent-Baur finds Villon addressing three separate audiences in the Testament and examines the various personas that Villon presents to this "plural audience."

In this essay, Williams cites Villon's intensity and directness as key reasons for continued interest in his work. Williams also delights in finding Villon to be consummately French.

In this essay, Storme argues that in avenging his own domination, Villon—as the narrator of Le Testament—victimizes the women he writes about, particularly in ballades such as “Les regrets de la belle Heaulmière” and “Ballade de la Grosse Margot.”

In this essay, Lacy, an important Villon scholar, suggests that the latter two ballades of the trilogy on the ubi sunt theme—“Ballade des seigneurs”” and “Ballade en vieil langage françoys”—have been undervalued by modern critics. Lacy argues that as a unit, the ballades represent Villon's continuing development of a unified theme, that of fleeting fame and the relentless forgetfulness of history.

Unrelated to the English author and painter Wyndham Lewis, D. B. Wyndham Lewis was a prominent English essayist, humorist, historian, and biographer. In the following excerpt, he defends Villon's poetry as high art of the most accomplished sort.

At the turn of the century Belloc was one of England's premier literary figures. His characteristically truculent stance as a proponent of Roman Catholicism and economic reform—and his equally characteristic clever humor—drew either strong support or harsh attacks from his audience, but critics have found common ground for admiration in his poetry. W. H. Auden called Belloc and his longtime collaborator G. K. Chesterton the best lightverse writers of their era, with Belloc's Cau...

Below, Cary reviews the Grand Testament and the Petit Testament.