SOURCE: “Desbordes-Valmore, Lamartine, and Poetic Motherhood,” in French Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 315-30.

In the following essay, Boutin compares late nineteenth-century essentialist interpretations of Desbordes-Valmore's poetry and that of Alphonse de Lamartine.

Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine, born respectively in 1786 and 1790, were old enough to be the grandparents of later nineteenth-century readers such as Baudelaire and Flaubert, who were born just one year after the publication of Méditations poétiques. These readers identify Lamartine and Desbordes-Valmore's poetry with childhood, a time when they read or heard their mothers read these poems. Not only did the two precursors influence the thematic and metrical choices of their heirs—an influence widely recognized by critics—but they also shaped the later generation's conception of a gendered poetic voice.¹

The generational gap—in which Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine act as parental figures to younger poets—produces a mode of textual influence that revolves...