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.
Bibliography
The essential Victor Hugo. Translated by E. H. Blackmore, A. M. Blackmore. Oxford University Press, 2004
The 1820s was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1820, and ended on December 31, 1829.
Victor-Marie Hugo 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. He is considered to be one of the greatest French writers of all time.
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny was a French poet and early French Romanticist. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a French literary critic.
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Émile de Saint-Amand Deschamps was a French poet. He was born at Bourges. The son of a civil servant, he adopted his father's career, but as early as 1812 he distinguished himself by an ode, La Paix conquise, which won the praise of Napoleon. In 1818 he collaborated with Henri de Latouche in two verse comedies, Selmours de Florian and Le Tour de faveur.
Athanase Laurent Charles Coquerel was a French Protestant theologian, born in Paris, elected deputy of the Constituent Assembly after the revolution of February 1848.
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Pierre-Justin-Marie Macquart was a French entomologist specialising in the study of Diptera. He worked on world species as well as European and described many new species.
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.
Louise-Angélique Bertin was a French composer and poet.
Henry Neele was an English poet and literary scholar. He was also a practising attorney in the West End of London.
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.
Thomas Smart Hughes (1786–1847) was an English cleric, theologian and historian.
Mathurin-Joseph Brisset was a French writer, poet, political journalist and playwright of the first half of the 19th century.
Pierre-Armand Malitourne was a 19th-century French journalist, literary critic and writer.
Auguste-Xavier Leprince was a French artist and painter who attained celebrity at the age of seventeen. His patrons included the Duchesse de Berry, Charles X, and Alexandre du Sommerard. He was also a teacher; in his twenties he established his own atelier in Paris, with pupils including his two younger brothers, Robert-Léopold and Pierre-Gustave, as well as Eugène Lepoittevin and Nicolas Alexandre Barbier. His meteoric career came to an abrupt end and his "brilliant promise was cut short by his premature death at the age of twenty-seven."
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.
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