SOURCE: "Poetry," in The French Romantics, Vol. 1, edited by D. G. Charlton, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 113-62.

In this excerpt, Ireson assesses Lamartine's contribution to French Romanticism.

Two dates effectively mark the period of the Romantic movement in French poetry. These are 1820, which saw the publication of Lamartine's Méditations poétiques, and 1840, which marks a point of termination and a clear divide in the poetry of the nineteenth century. Within these two decades, the values and procedures of French poetry were revolutionised….

Lamartine was the first poet to break through into the new period. The twenty-four poems of the original edition of his Méditations poétiques mark a departure from previous poetry, not in the form or language, for both of these clearly follow the models presented by the eighteenth century, but in the range and treatment of themes and in the sensibility which they express...