I lived from 1903-1923.
I was from France, and am in the European category.
I was influenced by poet Jean Cocteau.
French writer and poet, whose best-known work is The Devil in the Flesh, a tale of a love affair between a schoolboy and a young married woman during the First World War. Radiquet moved to Paris in his adolescence, as Rimbaud had done years before. Although Radiguet's style was undeveloped, his insights were universally true.
Read full description by biblion.com, Petri Liukkonen....
"Listen, I have something terrible to tell you. In three days I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God."
(Radiguet to Cocteau in December 1923)
Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés (Seine), a meteorological station some eight miles from Paris. His father was a cartoonist. Almost nothing is known of Radiguet's childhood and education but at a very early age he started to write poetry and in 1918 he arrived in Paris, where his career as a writer was subsequently short but astonishing.
At the age of 16 Radiguet became a member of Dadaist and Cubist circles, and then a protégé on Jean Cocteau. Althought Radiguet contributed to the magazine Sic, along with such writers as Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault, he was not interested in the many 'isms' that connected and separated intellectuals during those years. He was drawn instead to the classic tradition of poetry, especially 18th-century neoclassicism.
Radiguet's first book, LES JOUES EN FEU (published 1925), was a collection of poems, which he had written at fifteen. In 1921 he wrote a two-act play LES PÉLICANS, for which Georges Auric composed the music.
In 1920 Radiguet moved to the fishing village of Carqueiranne, near Toulon, and then to Piquet, where he wrote several poems and started work on his first novel, The Devil in the Flesh. Before the book was published, Cocteau read parts of it at Jean Hugo's studio at the Palais-Royal. Picasso among others was present; but Madame de Beaumont fell asleep during the reading. Four years earlier Apollinaire teased Radiguet: "Don't despair; Monsieur Rimbaud waited until he was seventeen before writing his masterpiece." The book made the author rich and famous. DEVOIRS DE VACANES, Radiguet's second collection of poems appeared in 1921.
The Devil in the Flesh was a modern version of Daphnis and Chloë. It was published first under the title COEUR VERT (Green heart) and shocked many critics who did not accept its bold freshness.
Radiguet's last novel, Count Orgel Opens the Ball, was published in 1924. Reminiscent of Mme. De La Fayette's La Princesse de Cléves (1677).
It is probable that Cocteau made more than minor revisions in both of Radiguet's novels, when they spent summer vacations writing side by side. Radiguet's career was short as he caught typhoid fever in Paris in 1923 and died on December 12, 1923 at the age 20.
Radiguet's other works include a volume of poetry, LES JOUES EN FEU (1920).
My poetry
Il perd ses plumes perd ses larmes
Comme un coeur se vide de larmes
28 lines
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