SOURCE: "Theme and Syllabic Position: Lamartine's Méditations poétiques, " in A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 1-30.

In the following excerpt, Scott contends that the flexibility of Lamartine 's poetic language enabled him to reveal "two worlds—a world of contingent existence, an uninhabited, purely natural, unregenerate world on the one hand, and, on the other, a world informed and visited by divinity, a world which may equally encompass the natural world. "

What is the nature of Lamartine's existential struggle? It is primarily, I suppose, a struggle with time, with time's passage. It is easy to assimilate this to the great poetic commonplaces of man's mortality, the fleetingness of beauty, happiness and so on. But this is to mask something thing unique about Lamartine. Lamartine is subject to time's cruelty in the very fabric of his verse: he experiences the...