Blackwell Reference Online

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French Romantic poetry is generally considered to have begun in 1820, with the publication of Alphonse de Lamartine's Méditations poétiques (Poetic Meditations) . This slim collection of 24 poems immediately won a breathtaking commercial success, running through seven editions within its first year, and awakened in the public emotions that until then had not found expression. As Lamartine would later write, “I am the first to have brought poetry down from Parnassus, to have given to what used to be called the muse, instead of a lyre with seven conventional strings, the very fibers of man's heart, touched and shaken by the innumerable shudderings of the soul and of nature” ( Lamartine 1968 : 303, my translation). Some 12 years later, the young poet Alfred de Musset would recall a friend's reaction: “You struck your brow, on reading Lamartine / Édouard, you blanched like a gambler abandoned by luck” ( Musset 1957 : 128). In Musset's subsequent commentary on this response, which seems to record more a projection of the poet's own attitudes than a faithful description of his friend Édouard Bocher's, two competing impulses seem forced together: on the one hand the jubilatory discovery that one's most intimate feelings could be the essential matter of poetry and, on the other, a violent sense of rivalry with other poets' expressions of their own interiority. Lamartine himself, however, ... log in or subscribe to read full text