Hugo, Victor | Laurence M. Porter (essay date 1978)
Laurence M. Porter (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "The Sublimity of Hugo's Odes," in The Renaissance of the Lyric in French Romanticism: Elegy, "Poëme" and Ode, French Forum Publishers, 1978, pp. 75-106.
[In this excerpt, Porter examines the ways in which Hugo transformed the ode genre during the early and middle phases of his career.]
Those contemporaries who were sympathetic to French Romanticism considered that it had revitalized three poetic genres: ode, elegy, and "Poëme." Later in the century, a neo-elegiac strain continues in the love poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine; a neo-epic tendency persists in Leconte de Lisle; and many romantic verse epics of redemption were composed; but the ode came eventually to predominate in nineteenth-century French literature. Such, at least, is the opinion of the poet Banville, who surveyed post-revolutionary poetry in 1871: "l'Ode, je le répète, une dernière fois, a absorbé tous les genres...
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