Jean Genet

Birth: 1910-12-19 , 6.º arrondissement de Paris

Death: 1986-04-14 , 13.º arrondissement de Paris

Jean Genet was a prominent French writer, playwright, and political activist. His work, often controversial, explores themes of crime, sexuality, marginality, and the search for transcendence through rebellion. Genet challenged the social and moral conventions of his time, using poetic and stylized language to portray the underworld and the human condition.

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Poems List

Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderer’s mind.

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

At the climax, you were lit up with a quiet ecstasy, which enveloped your blessed body in a supernatural nimbus, like a cloak that you pierced with your head and feet.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.

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Jean Genet was born in Paris, France, on December 19, 1910. After a youth marked by delinquency and imprisonment, Genet began to write, producing novels such as "Notre-Dame des Fleurs" (1943), "Miracle de la Rose" (1946), and "Pompes funèbres" (1947). He later dedicated himself to theater with plays such as "Les Bonnes" (1947) and "Le Balcon" (1956), which brought him international recognition. His life was equally turbulent, including political activism in support of the Palestinians. He died in Rabat, Morocco, on April 14, 1986.