Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. This item is unavailable.Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

Though less of a household name than his contemporaries in early twentieth century Paris, Jewish homosexual poet Max Jacob was Pablo Picasso’s initiator into French culture, Guillaume Apollinaire’s guide out of the haze of symbolism, and Jean Cocteau’s loyal friend. As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, the product of a complex amalgamation of Jewish, Breton, Parisian, and Roman Catholic influences.Max JacobJacob’s complex understanding of faith, art, and sexuality animates this sweeping work. In 1909, he saw a vision of Christ in his shabby room in Montmartre, and in 1915 he converted formally from Judaism to Catholicism—with Picasso as his godfather. In his later years, Jacob split his time between Paris and the monastery of Benoît-sur-Loire. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die a few days later.Max Jacob

Rosanna Warren is the author of six previous volumes of poetry and is a professor emerita in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She lives in New York City.