With Alphonse de Lamartine, says Louis Cazamian, "there begins an age when a normal feature of French literature is its genuinely poetic vein." In charming, often compelling prose, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François-René de Chateaubriand had already revived and extended the Romantic tradition, but no French writer had yet demonstrated that Romanticism could similarly revitalize the art of poetry. Méditations poétiques (1820; translated as The Poetical Meditations of M. Alphonse de La Martine: Translated into English Verse, 1839), featuring a strikingly supple and musical idiom, was that demonstration, and Lamartine was immediately recognized as the first major poet of the new Romanticism. Attached, like other ultraroyalists, to traditional religion, he outdid most of his confreres in expressing its themes and sentiments. The Méditations poétiques extended and enhanced the religious renaissance that had begun in 1802 with the publication of Chateaubriand's G...