‘I am inclined to think’, wrote I. A. Richards in one of the great pioneering works on the study of poetry (Practical Criticism), ‘that four poems are too many for a week's reading – absurd though this suggestion will seem to those godlike lords of the syllabus-world, who think that the whole of English literature can be perused with profit in about a year!’ He was speaking of the problems in the study of English poetry faced by native speakers. These problems are necessarily exacerbated when the poetry in question is not that of the mother tongue. If, as Richards also says in defence of his tonically restrictive view of the syllabus, ‘“making up our minds about a poem“ is the most delicate of all possible undertakings’, then this is a fortiori true when it comes to reading and studying poetry in a foreign language. The latter is arguably amongst the most testing of our literary experiences, and in many ways the most vulnerable to neglect, even in the specialist departments of that highly specialized world, the university. The present volume has been compiled with these problems in mind, and as such has a distinct pedagogic aim. It is addressed primarily to students, on the (perhaps overly pessimistic) assumption that, for a whole variety of reasons, the study of French poetry is rapidly becoming something of a poor relation in the family of the subject as a whole.