René Taupin (French: [topɛ̃]; 1905 – 13 February 1981[1]) was a French translator, critic, and academic who lived most of his life in the United States and is best known for heading the Romance Languages department at Hunter College.
In 1954, Taupin was appointed chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College.
[1] He wrote his major work in 1929, in which he compared the effects of Symbolist poems with those of Imagist poems and the different uses of imagery,[2] noting of the Imagists 'the pleasure of their poetry is not the satisfaction of discovering little by little, but of seizing at a single blow, in the fullest vitality, the image, a fusion of reality in words' and concluding 'between the image of the Imagist and the 'symbol' of the Symbolists there is a difference only of precision'[3] Taupin corresponded with Ezra Pound and was an associate of Louis Zukofsky (who also corresponded with Pound).
[4] Indiana University's Lilly Library Manuscript Collections has correspondence of Taupin's that includes letters from Zukofsky.
[5] Paul Mariani said about Taupin that he was "a bitter pill for us to swallow sometimes" because he made Americans "look a rather negative lot".