This is a book of essays about key milestones in the history of French poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries. The review includes almost all the outstanding lyricists of this period - Vigny, Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Saint-John Perse, Aragon, Eluard, and other names. In the genre of a free essay, a mosaic of individual portraits is formed from very short sketches to full-length ones. Such multi-scale analytical portraiture is the author’s preferred approach for creating a general picture of the historical and literary process of this time, its main patterns. Here traditional connections can be traced - from the Pushkin era - in the development of French and Russian literature. The book contains the best Russian translations of French lyrics.