SOURCE: "Francois Villon," in An Introduction to the French Poets: Villon to the Present Day, revised edition, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1973, pp. 1-10.

Brereton is an English educator who has written extensively on French literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Here, in a revised version of an essay originally published in 1956, he praises Villon's poetic technique of combining the traditional ballade form with the modern tendency to write about highly personal subject matter.

Villon was the last of the great French poets of the Middle Ages and one of the few who can now be read without a considerable background knowledge of medieval culture. He loses, of course, something in the process. One may fail to recognize the traditional nature of the themes he is treating, one may miss catching in his comments on life and death echoes going back two hundred years before his lifetime and...