SOURCE: "Victor Hugo and the Poetics of Doubt: The Transition of 1835-1837," in French Forum, Vol. 6, No. 2, May, 1981, pp. 140-53.

In the essay below, Kaplan examines how various "political, moral, and religious upheavals " in Hugo's life are reflected in his early lyric collections.

Victor Hugo's post-exile religious ideas are well known, as is the anguish at their foundation. Critics tend to prefer Les Contemplations, which is organized around Léopoldine's death in 1843, and the ambitious metaphysical epics which follow. Yet his earlier four lyrical collections—Les Feuilles d'automne (1831), Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), and Les Rayons et les ombres (1840)—trace an equally radical realignment of the poet's literary persona: Hugo was becoming detached from his royalism and Catholic faith, reflecting the crises of meaning which pervaded the July Monarchy. His brother's madness and death (in 1837), the suicides of several friends, guilt and anger at...