This anthology introduces the reader into a territory as unknown as it is exceptional: that of the French poetry of the Baroque. Always considered a little French, this poetry surprises with its versatility: it combines the high and the low, the spiritual and the obscene, the order and disorder, the gregarious and the individual. The Baroque system of things is resolved in a lyricism of disbelief, disenchantment, stoicism, hedonism and fear. Five are the poets who stand out in a group of fifty: Agrippa d'Aubigné, Jean de Sponde, Théophile de Viau, Saint-Amant and Tristan L'Hermite. Both they and the rest are conscious authors of their individualism, defenders of their freedom of conscience. The lyric of this period is an invitation to visit procedures and ways that the poetry of later centuries, with its growing fondness for seriousness and the system, has often forgotten.