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Hugo's achievement |
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Victor Hugo's achievement
was to vastly extend the range and authority of poetry.
Those who speak French indifferently will find Hugo's work
much easier to appreciate than Racine's, though there are
certainly problems. A far-ranging imagery, that verges on
the melodramatic in its attempt to put life into shadowy
abstractions. Torrents of symbols in surging rhythms that
can too often end in bombast. Visionary poetry that passed
itself off as the oracle of wisdom. None of these make the
man or his poetry easy to accept today, but Hugo brought
a new sense of the beauty of words, extended the lyrical
resources of French verse, and invigorated the alexandrine
with striking enjambments and placings of the caesura. The
output
was vast, and its diversity even more astonishing.
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Hugo's legacy |
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Contemporary French poetry, like that of contemporary
English poetry, draws its themes and styles from the nineteenth-century
poets who reacted against the excesses of Romanticism —
from Baudelaire,
Rimbaud and Mallarmé.
In other French poets has to be found what is often missing
from Hugo — tender passion (Musset),
unsentimental pathos (Fargue),
natural simplicity (Jammes),
mystical love (Éluard).
Nonetheless, the poetry of Claudel
and St. John
Perse is unthinkable without Hugo's example, as is the
concept, so dear to the French heart, of writer as man of
ideas. Hugo's style is the man, and the wholehearted force
of his personality has to be taken with the work. |
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Reading French poetry |
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French verse
readily achieves what is difficult in English — extended
prose poems, idiomatic expression that still 'obeys the rules',
catchy nightclub numbers that are undeniably poetry. But to
appreciate these matters, you need an ear for quantitative
verse and a knowledge of French prosody. Try On Reading
French Verse by R. Lewis (1982) or French Verse-Art
A Study by C. Scott (1980). Listen to French verse being
read on tape
and CD. If
you've forgotten your school French, then enroll on courses
and at learning centres.
Good sources for general information of Hugo include: Le
Comité National, Victor
Hugo Central, Hugoliennes,
AllReaders
(for novel plots), LucidCafe
and
IPL. Students of French literature may find these sources
useful: NASSFCL,
CCDSTSI and
French Library. |
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