SOURCE: Houston, John Porter. “The Poetry of Consciousness.” In French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement: A Study of Poetic Structures, pp. 1-95. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

In the following excerpt, Houston traces the development of nineteenth-century French poetic aesthetics through its transition from Romanticism to Symbolism.

1. Some Ideas on Art, Life, and Nature

From the early nineteenth century on, there are aspects of French aesthetic thought which stand out from contemporary English and German theory and anticipate the characteristic ideas on art of a later period. In fact, the first deeply influential and significant volume of French romantic poetry, Victor Hugo's Les Orientales (1829), has, both in its preface and contents, features whose consequences extend beyond what we normally think of as the chronological limits of French romanticism. The poems, which are set in parts of the Mediterranean world remote from Paris, are presented as the...