Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution

Marcel Martinet was involved in avant-garde literary circles in France in the early part of the twentieth century and was later closely associated with the campaign against the first world war, not least through his collection of ferocious anti-war poems, Les Temps maudits. In the 1920s Martinet was literary editor of the Communist daily newspaper L’Humanité, and was influential in shaping the party’s relations with intellectuals and promoting working-class culture. He left the party in 1924 and became a relentless critic of Stalin’s influence on the revolutionary movement. Throughout his life he continued to write poetry, novels and plays.

This book is the first dedicated to Martinet‘s life and work and contains many poems translated into English for the first time along with their French originals.