Recommendations
Books Like La Chute d'un ange
Best books to read after La Chute d'un ange by Lamartine
Lamartine's 1838 verse epic set in antediluvian times — the bold, failed complement to Jocelyn in his L'Humanité cycle. The angel Cédar falls from heaven for love of the mortal Daïdha and journeys through a primordial world. A genuine attempt at the total mythological poem, now reassessed as among the most ambitious things in French Romantic poetry.
- 1Buy
Jocelyn
by Alphonse de Lamartine
The other completed episode of L'Humanité — the pastoral Alpine complement to La Chute's antediluvian violence; reading both gives the full picture of Lamartine's epic ambition.
- 2Buy
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
by William Blake
Blake's mythological symbolism, with its fallen divine beings and its antinomian vision, is the closest thing in English to what Lamartine attempts — the total mythological poem that reimagines the conditions of human existence.
- 3Buy
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
The great English epic of the fallen angel — the most obvious classical predecessor to La Chute, and the work against which Lamartine's ambition was implicitly measured.
- 4Buy
Eloa
by Alfred de Vigny
Vigny's 1824 verse tale of a female angel who falls out of pity for Lucifer — the most direct French predecessor to La Chute d'un ange, published fifteen years earlier by a poet Lamartine admired.
- 5Buy
Prometheus Unbound
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley's verse drama of cosmic liberation — the closest English parallel to Lamartine's symbolic epic ambitions, and a work that shares the antidiluvian scale and metaphysical drama.
- 6Buy
The Prelude
by William Wordsworth
The great English Romantic autobiographical epic — a very different kind of long Romantic poem that succeeds where La Chute partially fails, by grounding its spiritual vision in specific personal experience.
- 7Buy
La Légende des siècles
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's epic mythological poems (1859-83), which succeeded where Lamartine's L'Humanité failed — covering the sweep of human spiritual history in verse with the scale and authority Lamartine was aiming for.
- 8Buy
Les Destinées
by Alfred de Vigny
Vigny's posthumous philosophical poems — the late works that develop the stoic metaphysics that runs through all French Romantic poetry, including La Chute's meditation on the fallen angel's condition.
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