Victor Hugo's Romantic Lyricism

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[...] The elevation of man Victor Hugo emphasizes the importance of evoking in lyrical poetry deep painting of the self'. It is thus a matter of elevating man to a higher, more dignified, and more beautiful condition. For the author, it is a matter of creating not a material work, but a broader and more universal work. The metaphor of Victor Hugo reflects this approach consisting of starting from the individual and his contemporaneity towards a transcended situation: 'the same sap for all roots', i.e. [...]

[...] It is thus that Victor Hugo aims to bring lyricism as close as possible to the reader. In doing so, he does not lose sight of his goal through lyricism, that is, by going as close as possible to men to bring them through poetry to transcend the materialistic self and elevate it. II. The elevation of man by poetry 1. The materialism of the individual transcended It is worth noting that even when Victor Hugo focuses on describing man in his individuality and contemporaneity, he uses lyrical lexical fields. [...]

[...] Nothing more diverse in appearance than his poems; at the bottom nothing more one and more coherent. His work, taken in its synthesis, would resemble the earth; productions of all kinds, a single first idea for all conceptions, flowers of all species, a single sap for all the roots. We will see in the following developments the characteristic elements of Victor Hugo's romantic lyricism, as exposed by the author himself in his preface, The Rays and the Shadows (1840). I. Romantic Lyricism, between contemporaneity and idealism 1. [...]

[...] starting from the earth, i.e. from materiality towards the elevation of the soul. 3. The poet at the service of a higher power Beyond the elevation of the reader, Victor Hugo designates as the ultimate goal of romantic lyricism the fact of putting oneself at the service of a « Civilizing work ». The work should thus maintain coherence to serve a ultimate goal, bring man that is to say the reader towards 'the splendor of God's creation'. Thus, beyond the multiplicity of poems, they must constitute a coherent corpus, tending towards this ultimate goal of bringing men to the knowledge and understanding of God and His civilizing lights. [...]

[...] It is not only a matter of anchoring oneself as close as possible to the individual, but also to their environment, to their actuality. Thus, Victor Hugo intends to make the theatre of lyricism not idealized events or anchored in mythology or an idealized past. He highlights the usefulness of attaching writing to the contemporary events of the reader. 2. A strong idealism In doing so, the lexicon used even contradicts this statement, the author using a lexical field linked to antiquity and ancient poets by evoking the "pantheons", the "sanctuary", an "altar". [...]