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

In the following excerpt, Ireson surveys Vigny's adaptation of the short, eighteenth-century heroic poem as a vehicle for the representation of modern values.

Vigny's development as a poet is initially associated … with the renovation and advancement of an older form of poetry. His concern was principally with the poème, a form which, in the later eighteenth century, had been used to signify a short epic or heroic poem, and Vigny's intention was to adapt it to the ideas and style of his time. His experiments with the poème lasted between 1820 and 1829, during which period he also turned, more briefly, to another form, the mystère, probably from the examples given by Byron in Cain (1821) and Heaven and Earth (1822). Two other forms, the élévation, with which he experimented for...