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Tristan Corbière (1845-1875), was born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean, in northwest France. The young poet's only book, Les Amours jaunes, was largely ignored until the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine wrote about him a decade after his untimely death. Marked by his use of irony and a distinctive local idiom, Corbière’s work is a cornerstone of modern French poetry, and has been influential to English and American modernists such as Pound and Eliot.
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The poems are bitter and conversational, often dramatic, split between tales of Parisian squalor and images of the Breton coast and people. With more drawing-room ennui some of the poems might sound like T.S. Eliot’s savage early quatrains. As it is, they sound like nothing but themselves.
Justin Sider, MAKE Literary Magazine
Reviews of books by Tristan Corbière
Poet by Default
