Michèle Lalonde is one of the poets of the Hexagone generation. Although she has been a poet since she first began to write, her poetry has perceptibly evolved from the obscure works written toward the end of the 1950s to the poems of commitment of the 1960s and 1970s. Over the years she has become an essayist and has contributed articles to leftist reviews; besides writing plays, radio scripts, film commentaries, and screenplays, she has also acted as an organizer of poetry readings. During the 1970s she was active on literary, intellectual, artistic, and sociopolitical fronts simultaneously.

It was not her academic background, however, which prepared her for her career as a writer. After taking a degree in philosophy at the University of Montreal in 1959, she continued her research at Harvard in 1960 and also in Baltimore (1962-1963) and in London (1963-1964). She was the author of...