Jacques Prévert
Quick answer: Jacques Prévert craft guide: street-level free verse, the inventory poem, and wordplay with teeth. Learn from France's most popular modern poet.
Paroles, published in 1946, did something poetry books almost never do: it sold in the hundreds of thousands and kept selling. Jacques Prévert, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1900, wrote poems that concierges, schoolchildren and philosophy professors could all recite, without ever writing down to anyone. He had passed through the Surrealist circle in the 1920s, and kept its love of startling collisions while ditching its obscurity.
He was also one of French cinema's great screenwriters, author of the scripts for Les Enfants du paradis and Le Quai des brumes, and his lyric 'Les Feuilles mortes' became the standard 'Autumn Leaves'. Poets study Prévert to learn how simplicity, wit and anger can share one page without spoiling each other.
The people's surrealist
Prévert's material is the Paris street: lovers in doorways, caged birds, schoolboys, waiters, war widows, pompous officials. His politics were instinctively anti-clerical, anti-military and anti-boss, delivered through mockery rather than lecture. A typical Prévert poem stages a tiny scene, lets it play out in everyday speech, then twists the last lines so tenderness or savagery breaks through.
Because his verse sits so close to talk, it moved easily into song and film. Composers, above all Joseph Kosma, set dozens of his texts, and generations of French pupils met poetry first through 'Page d'écriture' or 'Le Cancre', the dunce who says no to the teacher and yes to happiness.
The signature moves
First, the inventory. His poem 'Inventaire' is literally a list, stones, gardens, raccoons and all, and the technique runs through his work: catalogue items of wildly different scale and let the juxtapositions make the argument. One raccoon among ministries says plenty.
Second, spoken syntax with no punctuation to slow it. The lines follow breath and gesture, so reading Prévert aloud requires no training at all, which was the point. Third, wordplay with teeth: puns, literalised idioms and twisted proverbs that start as jokes and end as indictments. Fourth, the cinematic scene. Many poems, like 'Déjeuner du matin', are single continuous shots: a man stirs his coffee, puts on his hat, leaves in the rain, and the abandoned speaker weeps. Pure screenplay, total emotion.
What you can learn
Write an inventory poem of your week: fifteen items, no commentary, arranged so scale keeps jumping between the trivial and the enormous. The order is the craft; shuffle until the collisions spark.
Then try the single-shot poem. One domestic scene, present tense, only observable actions, no adjectives of feeling, and a final line where the camera admits it belongs to someone with a broken heart. It is harder than it looks and teaches the discipline of showing.
Where to start reading
Paroles is the essential book; Lawrence Ferlinghetti's translation for City Lights carried it into English and shaped the Beat generation's idea of a popular poetry. Read 'Déjeuner du matin', 'Barbara', his lament for bombed Brest, and 'Pour faire le portrait d'un oiseau', his recipe for painting a bird, which doubles as the best short essay on patience in art ever disguised as a children's poem.
What poets can take from this
- Build a list poem where items of wildly different sizes sit side by side.
- Write a scene using only observable actions, then let feeling enter in the last line.
- Literalise one idiom or proverb and follow the consequences seriously.
- Keep syntax speakable; if a stranger cannot read it aloud unrehearsed, simplify.
- Aim for the double audience: a child follows the story, an adult feels the knife.
Try it yourself
Write a recipe-poem giving instructions for something impossible to instruct, such as forgiving a friend or catching a memory, in plain kitchen language.
Questions
Why is Jacques Prévert so popular in France?
Paroles (1946) spoke everyday French, mixed humour with tenderness and rebellion, and moved naturally into songs and school anthologies. He remains one of the best-selling French poets of all time.
Did Prévert write for cinema?
Yes, he was a leading screenwriter of French poetic realism, scripting Les Enfants du paradis and Le Quai des brumes for director Marcel Carné, and his lyric became the song 'Autumn Leaves'.
What forms did Prévert use?
Mostly unpunctuated free verse close to speech: list poems, little dramatic scenes, songs and fable-like recipes, all built for reading aloud.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.