Guillevic, Eugène

Born Aug. 5, 1907, in Carnac. French poet. Member of the French Communist Party since 1942.

Guillevic first appeared in print on the eve of World War II in the magazine Commune (1939), with verses in memory of fallen Spanish Republicans. As a member of the Resistance movement, Guillevic took part in the underground patriotic press. The world is tragically depicted in poems from the collection From Earth and Water (1942). The laconic and severe lines of the collections Breaks (1947) and Writ of Execution (1947) call upon the people to struggle against the ugliness of their surroundings. Guillevic is the herald of the battle against social evils in the collections Thirst for Life and The Taste of Peace (both 1951) and Land for Happiness (1952). The themes of many of his poems of the 1950’s and 1960’s are the questions of war and peace and philosophic meditations on human duty (Together, 1966, and Euclidean Motifs, 1967). He translated into French a poetry collection by T. G. Shevchenko and the works of several Russian poets.