With her first book, Le Cour innombrable (The Innumerable Heart, 1901), Anna de Noailles became the most popular and celebrated female poet in early-twentieth-century France. Admired by writers, thinkers, artists, and politicians of many nationalities, this literary "star" of the Belle Epoque was the only woman writer of her time in France to receive the highest public recognition: in 1921 the Academie Française bestowed on her its Grand Prix de Littérature. The following year she became the first female member of the newly instituted Belgian Academy of French Language and Literature, and in 1931 she was the first woman ever to be elevated to the rank of Commandeur in the Legion of Honor. Poetry, which had gradually removed itself from the public with the Parnassians' cultivation of art for art's sake and with the linguistic complexities of the decadents and the symbolists, became popular again to a...