SOURCE: "Poetry," in The French Romantics, edited by D.G. Charlton, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 113-162.

In the following excerpt, Ireson examines the relationship between French Romantic poetry and Vigny 's experiments with poetic form.

Poetry appears to have enjoyed a favoured status in the Napoleonic and Restoration societies. The officer classes in the later years of the Empire seem to have viewed the writing of verse as a fashionable accomplishment; Joseph-Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, a general in Napoleon's army and latterly governor of a province in Spain, gave his son advice on prosody when Victor was serving his apprenticeship in the art. Vigny appears to have had little difficulty in combining, in the Parisian salons around 1820, the appeal of a fashionable officer with the prestige of a promising young poet. More importantly, the society of the returned émigrés, however reactionary in politics, had expectations of a revived...