23 French language poets

Jean el Mouhouv Amrouche was an Algerian francophone writer, poet and journalist.

Isabelle de Charrière, known as Belle van Zuylen in the Netherlands, née Isabella Agneta Elisabeth van Tuyll van Serooskerken, and [Madame] Isabelle de Charrière elsewhere, was a Dutch and Swiss writer of the Enlightenment who lived the latter half of her life in Colombier, Neuchâtel. She is now best known for her letters and novels, although she also wrote pamphlets, music and plays. She took a keen interest in the society and politics of her age, and her work around the time of the French Revolution is regarded as being of particular interest.

Léo Ferré was a Monégasque poet and composer, and a dynamic and controversial live performer, whose career in France dominated the years after the Second World War until his death. He released some forty albums over this period, composing the music and the majority of the lyrics. He released many hit singles, particularly between 1960 and the mid-seventies. Some of his songs have become classics of the French chanson repertoire, including "Avec le temps", "C'est extra", "Jolie Môme" and "Paris canaille".

Lorand Gaspar was a Hungarian–born French poet.

André Henri Constant van Hasselt was a Dutch-Belgian writer and poet who wrote mainly in French.

Hawad, sometimes Mahmoudan Hawad, is a Tuareg poet and author born in the Aïr region of Niger and who currently lives and publishes from Aix-en-Provence, France. Hawad deploys a method he calls furigraphy to create space in his poetry and to illuminate certain themes. Common themes of his work include thirst, movement, wandering, anarchy, and political themes related to Tuareg politics in the region. He is married to Hélène Claudot-Hawad, a Tuareg scholar and translator of Hawad's poetry into French. He has published a number of poems, epics, and other literary works primarily in French, but translations have increased in recent years with an Arabic translation of Testament nomade by prominent Syrian poet Adunis.

Sabine Huynh is a Vietnamese-born French–Israeli writer, poet, translator, and literary critic, who has lived in Israel since 2001.

Jalal Khoury was a playwright, theatre director, comedian and artistic editor.

Dimitri Kitsikis was a Greek Turkologist, Sinologist and Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics. He published also poetry in French and Greek.

Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco.

Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a French poet born in Uruguay. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern arts and literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Ducasse died at the age of 24.

Stuart Fitzrandolph Merrill was an American poet, who wrote mostly in the French language. He belonged to the Symbolist school. His principal books of poetry were Les Gammes (1887), Les Fastes (1891), and Petits Poèmes d'Automne (1895).

Jean Moréas, was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.

César Moro is the pseudonym of Alfredo Quíspez Asín Mas, a Peruvian poet and painter. Most of his poetic works are written in French; he was the only Latin American poet included in the 1920s and '30s surrealist journals of André Breton and the first Latin American artist to join the surrealist group on his own initiative, as opposed to being recruited by Breton.

Jean Portante is a Luxembourg writer who resides in Paris. He has written novels, stories, plays, journalistic articles and poetry, and has been widely translated.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era. He is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet, and the founder of modern Russian literature.

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, born Joseph-Casimir Rabearivelo, is widely considered to be Africa's first modern poet and the greatest literary artist of Madagascar. Part of the first generation raised under French colonization, Rabearivelo grew up impoverished and failed to complete secondary education. His passion for French literature and traditional Malagasy poetry (ohabolana) prompted him to read extensively and educate himself on a variety of subjects, including the French language and its poetic and prose traditions. He published his first poems as an adolescent in local literary reviews, soon obtaining employment at a publishing house where he worked as a proofreader and editor of its literary journals. He published numerous poetry anthologies in French and Malagasy as well as literary critiques, an opera, and two novels.

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. He is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets". He wrote both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers.

Georges Schehadé was a Lebanese playwright and poet writing in French.

Salah Stétié was a Lebanese writer and poet who wrote in the French language. He also served in various diplomatic positions for Lebanon in countries such as Morocco and France. Although his mother tongue was Arabic, Stetie chose to write in French.

Jules Supervielle was a Franco-Uruguayan poet and writer born in Montevideo. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.

Alain Tasso is a Lebanese-French poet, painter and essayist. An autodidact, his prolific intense literary work is largely acclaimed by critics.

Renée Vivien was a British poet who wrote in French, in the style of the Symbolistes and the Parnassiens. A high-profile lesbian in the Paris of the Belle Époque, she is notable for her work, which has received more attention following a recent revival of interest in Sapphic verse. Many of her poems are autobiographical, pertaining mostly to Baudelarian themes of extreme romanticism and frequent despair. She was the subject of a pen-portrait by her friend and neighbor Colette.