The poetry of FranƯcois Villon is always intensely personal, a distillation of the heart and soul of perhaps the most notorious figure in all literature. Libertine, brawler, thief, scholar, rake, murderer, Villon was a citizen of Paris and a lover of its teeming streets, the sounds and sights of which fill his works: "The Legacy", "The Testament", "Miscellaneous Poems", and "Poems in Slang". The works of the man who has been called the key figure in modern poetry are presented here in a fresh, free-verse English translation as well as in the original French. The design of the book is such that the French text and the English translation face each other on opposite pages, line for line, verse for verse. Along with the brilliant introduction by William Carlos Williams, the volume contains a short biography of Villon, a foreword concerning the text, translation, and notes, as well as a bibliography and an index of first lines, both in French and in English.