Source: National Archives & Historic Records of France
Literature & Poetry • Historical Archive • 🇫🇷 France • 0 views

Francis Ponge 🇫🇷

Francis Ponge (Known as "Poet of Things")
Poet, Essayist, Creator of the 'Proême', Author of Le Parti pris des choses (Taking the Side of Things)
Born Mar 27, 1899 🇫🇷 Montpellier, France
Passed Away Aug 06, 1988 Le Bar-sur-Loup (Alpes-Maritimes), France
Lifespan 89 years old
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Notice / Correction
"Taking the side of things is to look at a pebble with such patient reverence that it reveals the whole geology of language."

Archival Overview

Inventive French poet who revolutionized twentieth-century literature with Le Parti pris des choses (Taking the Side of Things, 1942), dedicating dense prose poems to inanimate objects like bread, snails, soap, and pebbles.

Biographical Record

After studying law and philosophy in Paris and working as a typesetter and insurance clerk, Ponge participated in the French Resistance and worked for the communist press. Rejecting romantic lyricism and grand abstractions, he resolved to look at physical things with scientific and etymological rigor.

In Le Parti pris des choses, he examined the texture of bread ('a miniature mountain range'), the dignity of the cage of a crate, and the dissolution of soap. He invented the 'proême' (prose-poem), celebrated by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Jacques Derrida as a philosophical masterpiece of phenomenological description.

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Final Resting Place

Perpetual Memorial
Montpellier Protestant Cemetery (Cimetière protestant de Montpellier)
Montpellier, France
GPS: 43.6167, 3.8667
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