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This much is certain: if not for the arrival of William and his armies on English soil in 1066, the English language as we know it would never have come into being. For the next three hundred years French was the language spoken at the English court, and it was not until the end of the Hundred Years’ War that it became clear, once and for all, that France and England were not to become a single country. Even John Gower, one of the first to write in the English vernacular, composed a large portion of his work in French, and Chaucer, the greatest of the early English poets, devoted much of his creative energy to a translation of Le Roman de la rose and found his first models in the work of the Frenchman Guillaume de Machaut. It is not simply that French must be considered an ‘influence’ on the development of English language and literature; French is a part of English, an irreducible element of its genetic make-up.

Early English literature is replete with evidence of this symbiosis, and it would not be difficult to compile a lengthy catalogue of borrowings, homages and thefts. William Caxton, for instance, who introduced the printing press in England in 1477, was an amateur translator of medieval French works, and many of the first books printed in Britain were English versions of French romances and tales of chivalry. For the printers who worked under Caxton, translation was a normal and accepted part of their duties, and even the most popular English work to be published by Caxton, Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, was itself a ransacking of Arthurian legends from French sources: Malory warns the reader no less than fifty-six times during the course of his narrative that the ‘French book’ is his guide.

In the next century, when English came fully into its own as a language and a literature, both Wyatt and Surrey – two of the most brilliant pioneers of English verse – found inspiration in the work of Clément Marot, and Spenser, the major poet of the next generation, not only took the title of his Shepheardes Calender from Marot, but two sections of the work are direct imitations of that same poet. More importantly, Spenser’s attempt at the age of seventeen to translate Joachim du Bellay (The Visions of Bellay) is the first sonnet sequence to be produced in English. His later revision of that work and translation of another du Bellay sequence, Ruines of Rome, were published in 1591 and stand among the great works of the period. Spenser, however, is not alone in showing the mark of the French. Nearly all the Elizabethan sonnet writers took sustenance from the Pléiade poets, and some of them – Daniel, Lodge, Chapman – went so far as to pass off translations of French poets as their own work. Outside the realm of poetry, the impact of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays on Shakespeare has been well documented, and a good case could be made for establishing the link between Rabelais and Thomas Nashe, whose 1594 prose narrative, The Unfortunate Traveler, is generally considered to be the first novel written in the English language.

On the more familiar terrain of modern literature, French has continued to exert a powerful influence on English. In spite of the wonderfully ludicrous remark by Southey that poetry is as impossible in French as it is in Chinese, English and American poetry of the past hundred years would be inconceivable without the French. Beginning with Swinburne’s 1862 article in The Spectator on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and the first translations of Baudelaire’s poetry into English in 1869 and 1870, modern British and American poets have continued to look to France for new ideas. Saintsbury’s article in an 1875 issue of The Fortnightly Review is exemplary. ‘It was not merely admiration of Baudelaire which was to be persuaded to English readers,’ he wrote, ‘but also imitation of him which, at least with equal earnestness, was to be urged on English writers.’

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, largely inspired by Théodore de Banville, many English poets began experimenting with French verse forms (ballades, lays, virelays and rondeaux), and the ‘art for art’s sake’ ideas propounded by Gautier were an important source for the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. By the 1890s, with the advent of The Yellow Book and the Decadents, the influence of the French Symbolists became widespread. In 1893, for example, Mallarmé was invited to lecture at Oxford, a sign of the esteem he commanded in English eyes.

It is also true that little of substance was produced in English as a result of French influences during this period, but the way was prepared for the discoveries of two young American poets, Pound and Eliot, in the first decade of the new century. Each came upon the French independently, and each was inspired to write a kind of poetry that had not been seen before in English. Eliot would later write that ‘… the kind of poetry I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in England at all, and was only to be found in France.’ As for Pound, he stated flatly that ‘practically the whole development of the English verse-art has been achieved by steals from the French.’

The English and American poets who formed the Imagist group in the years just prior to World War I were the first to engage in a critical reading of French poetry, with the aim not so much of imitating the French as of rejuvenating poetry in English. More or less neglected poets in France, such as Corbière and Laforgue, were accorded major status. F. S. Flint’s 1912 article in The Poetry Review (London) and Ezra Pound’s 1913 article in Poetry (Chicago) did much to promote this new reading of the French. Independent of the Imagists, Wilfred Owen spent several years in France before the war and was in close contact with Laurent Tail-hade, a poet admired by Pound and his circle. Eliot’s reading of the French poets began as early as 1908, while he was still a student at Harvard. Just two years later he was in Paris, reading Claudel and Gide and attending Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France.

By the time of the Armory show in 1913, the most radical tendencies in French art and writing had made their way to New York, finding a home with Alfred Stieglitz and his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Many of the names associated with American and European modernism became part of this Paris-New York connection: Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, Alfred Kreymborg, Marius de Zayas, Walter C. Arensberg, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Under the influence of Cubism and Dada, of Apollinaire and the Futurism of Marinetti, numerous magazines carried the message of modernism to American readers: 291, The Blind Man, Rongwrong, Broom, New York Dada, and The Little Review, which was born in Chicago in 1914, lived in New York from 1917 to 1927, and died in Paris in 1929. To read the list of The Little Review’s contributors is to understand the degree to which French poetry had permeated the American scene. In addition to work by Pound, Eliot, Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, as well as its most celebrated contribution, James Joyce’s Ulysses, the magazine published Breton, Eluard, Tzara, Péret, Reverdy, Crevel, Aragon and Soupault.

Beginning with Gertrude Stein, who arrived in Paris well before World War I, the story of American writers in Paris during the twenties and thirties is almost identical to the story of American writing itself. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, e e cummings, Hart Crane, Archibald MacLeish, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, Laura Riding, Thornton Wilder, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Glenway Wescott, Henry Miller, Harry Crosby, Langston Hughes, James T. Farrell, Anäis Nin, Nathanael West, George Oppen – all of these and others either visited or lived in Paris. The experience of those years has so thoroughly saturated American consciousness that the image of the starving young writer serving his apprenticeship in Paris has become one of our enduring literary myths.

It would be absurd to assume that each of these writers was directly influenced by the French. But it would be just as absurd to assume that they went to Paris only because it was a cheap place to live. In the most serious and energetic magazine of the period, transition, American and French writers were published side by side, and the dynamics of this exchange led to what has probably been the most fruitful period in our literature. Nor does absence from Paris necessarily preclude an interest in things French. The most Francophilic of all our poets, Wallace Stevens, never set foot in France.

Since the twenties, American and British poets have been steadily translating their French counterparts – not simply as a literary exercise, but as an act of discovery and passion. Consider, for example, these words from John Dos Passos’s preface to his translations of Cendrars in 1930: ‘… A young man just starting to read verse in the year 1930 would have a hard time finding out that this method of putting...