Author | Victor Hugo |
---|---|
Original title | Odes et Ballades |
Language | French |
Publisher | Hector Bossange |
Publication date | 1828 |
Publication place | France |
Odes et Ballades, published in 1828, is the most complete version of a collection of poems by Victor Hugo written and published between 1822 and 1828. It includes five books of odes and one book of ballads.
They are among his very earliest works, and reflect the Catholic royalist views of his early twenties. He would write seven different prefaces for it, dated 1822, 1823, 1824, 1826, 1828, followed by one in 1853, at which time he was in self-imposed exile, and a final one in 1880. Hugo expresses a view of the difference between "order" and "regularity" which elevates the former on the basis that an irregularity in art can have its own logic, or order, and achieve effects impossible to regularity, or classical evenness.
The version of 1826 received a generally positive review from the 22-year-old Sainte-Beuve in the Globe (January 1827), and this review resulted in their friendship.
The collection includes Ode à la Colonne de la Place Vendôme , a response to the Austrian ambassador's decision in early 1827 to stop recognizing Napoleonic titles. First published in the Journal des débats , it represents the first praise of Napoleon in Hugo's work (but not a major political shift as he later claimed). It should be distinguished from the ode on the same subject in Les Chants du crépuscule .
The 1820s was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1820, and ended on December 31, 1829.
Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo, sometimes nicknamed the Ocean Man, was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms.
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The poems of Victor Hugo captured the spirit of the Romantic era. They were largely devoted to 19th-century causes. Many touched on religious themes. Initially they were royalist but soon became Bonapartist, Republican and liberal. Hugo's poems on nature revealed a continuing search for the great sublime.
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Imitation is the doctrine of artistic creativity according to which the creative process should be based on the close imitation of the masterpieces of the preceding authors. This concept was first formulated by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the first century BCE as imitatio, and has since dominated for almost two thousand years the Western history of the arts and classicism. Plato has regarded imitation as a general principle of art, as he viewed art itself as an imitation of life. This theory was popular and well accepted during the classical period. During the Renaissance period, imitation was seen as a means of obtaining one's personal style; this was alluded to by the artists of that era like Cennino Cennini, Petrarch and Pier Paolo Vergerio. In the 18th century, Romanticism reversed it with the creation of the institution of romantic originality. In the 20th century, the modernist and postmodern movements in turn discarded the romantic idea of creativity, and heightened the practice of imitation, copying, plagiarism, rewriting, appropriation and so on as the central artistic device.
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The French Restoration style was predominantly Neoclassicism, though it also showed the beginnings of Romanticism in music and literature. The term describes the arts, architecture, and decorative arts of the Bourbon Restoration period (1814–1830), during the reign of Louis XVIII and Charles X from the fall of Napoleon to the July Revolution of 1830 and the beginning of the reign of Louis-Philippe.
Trilby; or, The Fairy of Argyll is an 1822 literary fairy tale novella by French author Charles Nodier (1780–1844). In it, a Scottish household spirit falls in love with the married woman of the house, who at first has him banished, then misses him, and eventually returns his love, both of them dying at the end. It was a popular work of the Romantic movement, published in multiple editions and translations. It also gave birth to adaptations as multiple ballets, including La Sylphide, and Trilby, and the opera The Mountain Sylph, some of which only retained the basic idea of love between a fairy and a Scottish peasant, but otherwise greatly diverged from the original plot.