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Far from being a peripheral phenomenon, the prison poetry of Clément Marot (the poems of the “prison cycle,” 1534; L'Enfer, 1539), Michel d'Amboise (Aglogue ou carme pastoral, 1533; Le Babilon, 1535), and Étienne Dolet (Le Second Enfer, 1544) is a powerful indicator of a new questioning of the profound nature of the relationship between a singular individual and the community that has been temporarily left behind. In a continuation of the Boecian tradition, and in the particular context of penal legislation at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the poet-prisoner finds himself in a doubly unprecedented situation: as a prisoner “stripped naked” and separated from the community, he is particularly conscious of his own state and of the defects of the community from which he has been unjustly excluded; and as a paradoxically “chosen” poet, marked (positively) by infamy, he is capable of producing a new vision of this community that is both distant and desired.