Alfred de Vigny Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Laurence M. Porter

Critical Essay by Laurence M. Porter

SOURCE: "Symbolic Gesture in Vigny's 'Poëme,'" in The Renaissance of the Lyric in French Romanticism: Elegy, "Poëme" and Ode, French Forum Publishers, Lexington, Kentucky, 1978, pp. 19-74.

In the following excerpt, Porter examines Vigny's "visual sensitivity" and traces his use of gesture and posture to illustrate character in his symbolic poetry

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At first, Vigny's poetic projects were determined mainly by the epic ambitions he shared with his contemporaries. In 1823, he planned to rival Hesiod by composing a "Théogonie chrétienne," "poëme immense qui achèverait l'œuvre du Dante et de Milton" by relating the history of humanity and the destinies of the world (10). The Poëmes antiques et modernes, fragmented into discontinuous episodes, are in a sense the debris of these unrealized epic projects. (Perhaps these projects should not be taken too literally, but rather considered as the poetic counterpart of fantasies of lost aristocratic dominance) (11). The few poems...
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