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Books Like Méditations poétiques
Best poetry to read after Méditations poétiques by Lamartine
Readers drawn to Lamartine's intimate lyric mode, the natural landscape as emotional correlative, and the founding poems of French Romanticism will find the poets who surrounded him and the European Romantic tradition he was part of.
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Les Contemplations
by Victor Hugo
The greatest collection of French Romantic poetry and the one that most completely surpasses what Lamartine began — Hugo's 1856 collection, organized around the death of his daughter Léopoldine in 1843, is the fullest realization of the Romantic lyric as a meditation on grief, memory, and the aspiration toward transcendence that Lamartine's Méditations inaugurated in 1820.
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Nuits
by Alfred de Musset
The companion in the tradition of the French Romantic lyric about personal suffering — Musset's four 'Nuits' poems (La Nuit de mai, La Nuit de décembre, La Nuit d'août, La Nuit d'octobre, 1835–37) are the most directly confessional French Romantic lyrics after Lamartine, written during and after the Sand affair; the 'Muse' who speaks to the poet in each poem is the direct inheritor of the intimate apostrophe that Lamartine established in 'Le Lac.'
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Les Poèmes antiques et modernes
by Alfred de Vigny
The companion collection by the most philosophical of the French Romantic poets — Vigny's collection (1826, expanded 1837) includes 'Moïse' (Moses on the mountain, unable to enter the Promised Land — Vigny's most direct statement of the stoic vision) and 'Eloa' (a fallen angel who descends to save Satan and is seduced by him); the collection represents the intellectual pole of French Romantic poetry, in contrast to Lamartine's emotional pole.
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Odes et Ballades
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's first collection (1822, expanded 1826) and the companion to Lamartine's Méditations as a founding text of French Romantic poetry — where Lamartine established the intimate lyric, Hugo established the Romantic ode and ballad; reading both collections together reveals the range of forms that French Romanticism developed from the neoclassical inheritance.
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Lyrical Ballads
by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The English companion to the Méditations poétiques as a founding text of Romantic poetry — Wordsworth and Coleridge's 1798 collection established the same intimate lyric mode in English that Lamartine would establish in French twenty-two years later; both collections argue against neoclassical poetic diction and for the poet's direct personal experience as legitimate poetic subject.
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Graziella
by Alphonse de Lamartine
Lamartine's prose companion to the Méditations — his 1852 autobiographical novel about a young man's love affair with a Neapolitan fisherman's granddaughter is the narrative version of the emotional world the Méditations lyricize; reading Graziella after the Méditations gives the personal story behind the lyric voice.
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Jocelyn
by Alphonse de Lamartine
Lamartine's long narrative poem (1836), about a village priest's renounced love, is the major work of his poetic middle period — between the Méditations and the political career — and the poem that Lamartine himself considered his greatest achievement; its combination of lyric feeling and narrative ambition represents a different scale of Romantic poetry than the intimate lyric of the Méditations.
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The Prelude
by William Wordsworth
The English companion in the tradition of the Romantic poem about memory, loss, and the formation of the poet — Wordsworth's autobiographical epic about the growth of the poet's mind is the English equivalent of what Lamartine was attempting in concentrated lyric form; both poets use personal memory and natural landscape as the primary materials of poetry, and both argue that the emotional life is as worthy of poetic treatment as public and heroic subjects.
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