French poetry history

POETRY

DURING the third quarter of the nineteenth century poetry
undergoes the same experience as prose and becomes less
Romantic or, at any rate, assumes that form of neo-Romanticism
expressed by the study of art for art's sake. It was not to be
expected that Victor Hugo should change his attitude, nor did
he, but in nearly all other writers the subjective strain became for
a time less marked except in some of the women sentimentalists.
Mme Louise Colet ( 1810-1876), the friend of Cousin and Flau­
bert, was a poetess of the school of Lamartine. Mme Blanche­
cotte ( 1830-1897), also of the school of Lamartine, wrote of
withered illusions and disappointed hopes. Louisa Sieffert
( 1845-1877), again, was the poetess of lost happiness and Rayons
perdus. On the other hand, even a militant Romanticist such
as Théophile Gautier was becoming more objective in Emaux
et Camées. Louis Bouilhet ( 1822-1869), a friend of Flaubert,
was the author of sundry plays, mostly in verse, such as Melænis,
a Roman tale, and Festons et Astragales. Of these the latter,
though the title is borrowed from Boileau, reminds one of such
a heading as Emaux et Camées and shows, in a minor key, some
of the transitional tendencies: exotic scenes and cult of objective
form. The most significant writers of the new objective poetry
and the models of the younger generation were Gautier, Théodore
de Banville, Baudelaire, and Leconte de Lisle.

The theory of art for art's sake was partly the result of reaction
against the industrialism of life becoming more accentuated
as the century progressed and against the belief that art should
be made useful and subordinate to other aims. The poets were

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Publication Information: Book Title: A History of French Literature. Contributors: C. H. Conrad Wright - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1912. Page Number: 790.