According to the entry in the Oxford Companion to French Literature, by Graham Dunstan Martin, André Frénaud (1907-93), a , native of Burgundy, was a poet. For most his life he held an office job with French Railways. His two-year imprisonment in Germany after the collapse of France in 1940 is a main source of his first collection, Les Rois Mages (1943).

He has a great range of manners and tones: at times highly concrete and down-to-earth, as warm, humorous, and bluff as his own personality (see, in addition to the collection just mentioned, La Sainte Face, 1968, 1985)—at other times appealing to archetypal symbols, particularly in the long poems which he was unusual in continuing to write (e. g. La Sorcière de Rome, 1973). The key experience in Frénaud is ‘visitation’, in which a surge of energy (carrying with it a sense of unity) constructs a miraculous ‘château’ of words. In his trance, the poet has felt himself ‘another’, but is sadly restored to his everyday self at the end of the experience, and inspects his poem with mingled wonder and disappointment. Despite its great energy, Frénaud's poetry has a pedal-note of melancholy. His output is large: see also II n'y a pas de paradis (1962) and Haeres (1982), and consult the interviews of Notre inhabileté fatale (1979). According to Graham Dunstan Martin's entry in the Oxford Companion to French Literature, André Frénaud, (1907-93). was anative of Burgundy. "For most his life he held an office job with French Railways. His two-year imprisonment in Germany after the collapse of France in 1940 is a main source of his first collection of poems, Les Rois Mages (1943).

He has a great range of manners and tones: at times highly concrete and down-to-earth, as warm, humorous, and bluff as his own personality (see, in addition to the collection just mentioned, La Sainte Face, 1968, 1985)—at other times appealing to archetypal symbols, particularly in the long poems which he was unusual in continuing to write (e. g. La Sorcière de Rome, 1973). The key experience in Frénaud is ‘visitation’, in which a surge of energy (carrying with it a sense of unity) constructs a miraculous ‘château’ of words. In his trance, the poet has felt himself ‘another’, but is sadly restored to his everyday self at the end of the experience, and inspects his poem with mingled wonder and disappointment. Despite its great energy, Frénaud's poetry has a pedal-note of melancholy. His output is large: see also II n'y a pas de paradis (1962) and Haeres (1982), and consult the interviews of Notre inhabileté fatale (1979)."