[...] Absolute, in the relentless search for the unfulfilled, they dreamed and embarked on a journey of freedom and catharsis, testimony and martyrdom of elevation and destruction. Icaruses who wanted to find "the end and the means of the universe" were burned in flight "by the love of beauty", stars that dissolved in their contact with the atmosphere of reality. They executed ballistic trajectories and fell to the surface under the influence of the gravity of a earth they denied.
The poet's consciousness of the things that surround him is more acute, which is why it gives birth to the indomitable desire in most people to escape from the perceptible, often hostile and ugly, to the unknown and inaccessible. The poet boards the ship "immersed in the poem" and opens up to the dangerous, unknown sea to meet the Other, the real reality, the one that the "visible", visionary poet sees. His soul even "sails for terrible shipwrecks". And it calls us with silences and screams to refuse the compromise with "the slavery of man", with anything that can "cast a shadow on the beauty of this world". To stay awake "in this time of shamelessness and alienation", to awaken the dream of beauty that the world has put to sleep within us, and above all to follow it to its dangerous end, until "the time of man is announced", until the ideal is translated into living reality. "Keep your dreams. The wise do not have anything as beautiful as the mad ones!". This is what it leaves us, as a wish and a curse.

This anthology is necessarily non-exhaustive. We attempted to make it representative. We give the floor sparingly to these poets to speak for the others. Because the most important thing for most is to be heard. To have their voice returned to them, and above all to be allowed their voice. This was the mission given to us: to confirm their certainty that someone, "in the gray future similar to an uncertain dawn", will remember them. And it happened as they wished, in the "light drizzle that smells and is as beautiful as the sea of olives"... in a blessed place "where no sigh was left without an echo".

If, while reading or leafing through this anthology, a bitter taste remains in your mouth, "like a little ash", do not forget that even "every sorrow is there to cover a miracle" and that always "the poet seeks a new dawn among his manuscripts". Even at the moment when he is sinking and darkness swallows him...

(from the introduction of the book)

The following are anthologized: Rutebeuf, Francois Villon, Charles-Louis de Malfilatre, Nicolas Gilbert, Andre Chenier, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Aloysious Bertrand, Gerard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Charles Baudelaire, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Charles Cros, Stefane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbiere, Lautreamont, Maurice Rollinat, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Paul-Jean Toulet, Alfred Jarry, Renee Vivien, Gaston Coute, Blaise Cendrars, Maurice Blanchard, Antonin Artaud, Andre Gaillard, Rene Crevel, Ilarie Voronca, Andre de Richaud, Roger Gilbert-Lecompte, Rene Daumal, Jean Genet, Armand Robin, Andre Frederiaque, Jaques Prevel, Gilbert H. Dallas, Marc Patin, Gerald Nevel, Roger Milliot, Olivier Larronde, Stanislas Rodanski, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Roger-Arnould Riviere, Andre Laude, Jean-Philippe Salabreuil.