Francis Ponge was born in Montpellier, France, in 1899. He studied law at Paris and literature at Strasbourg. He worked as an editor and journalist in France during the First World War, made contacts with the Surrealist movement, and joined the Communist Party in 1937, leaving the party after World War II in 1947. After living briefly in Algeria, he returned to France, where he held a professorship at the Alliance Française from 1952 until 1965. In 1974, he was awarded the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature, following a favorable article on his works by Sartre.

He died in 1988 in Le Bar-sur-Loup.

In his most famous work, Le parti pris des choses (Often translated The Voice of Things), he meticulously described common things such as oranges, potatoes and cigarettes in a poetic voice, but with a personal style and paragraph form (prose poem) much like an essay. These poems owe much to the work of the French Renaissance poet Remy Belleau. Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects. His work is often associated with the philosophy of Phenomenology.

He described his own works as "a description-definition-literary artwork" which avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry.