Jacques brel et ses chansons

The poet is the only constant in human's history. There was no scientist before Los Alamos. Newton was a natural philosopher. They already disappeared and now became engineers, technicians or of the computer variety.

There have been poets since the dawn of man. Brel was the French language poet of our time. The universe he painted is no less poignant than the one of Rimbaud, the greatest of them. As a rather secondary issue, Brel's prose was set to music. He was the composer of his songs, a moving interpreter of them and—this is where he stands up in the crowd of talents as one of those with this distinctive touch of genius that engraves their creation into immortality—he was a uniquely inspired writer who could mould with words naked emotions. He was a poet.

His vocabulary is not sophisticated but his constructions are admirable, using oxymoron, puns, neologisms, familiar expressions, powerful metaphors, insightful analogies and, most of all, powerful poetic images.

In Les amants de cœur, for instance, he captures in less than five minutes all

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