Les Voix intérieures Reading Order

Les Voix intérieures (Interior Voices, 1837) by Victor Hugo is the most philosophical and formally ambitious of the four lyric collections of the 1830s — the collection in which Hugo begins to develop the visionary ambition that will culminate in Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles. The title is programmatic: these are the interior voices that the poet hears in the world around him — the voice of nature, the voice of conscience, the voice of history — and the collection is built around the idea of the poet as a mediator between these voices and the human world that needs to hear them. The collection contains 'À Virgile,' the great meditation on poetic tradition, and the long poem 'La Vache' (The Cow), which is both a domestic idyll and a philosophical meditation on the relationship between human and animal life; it also contains some of Hugo's most intensely private lyrics about his children and his marriage. The tension between the private and the prophetic that is productive in Les Chants du crépuscule is here resolved in the direction of the prophetic: Les Voix intérieures announces the late Hugo more clearly than any earlier collection.