Lamartine

Summary

Dominique Pagani treats the Méditations poétiques of 1820 as the official date of the beginning of French Romanticism in the strict sense, at a time when the German Romantics were already dead1. He often returns to L'Isolement: for him, "Tristement je m'assieds" ("Sadly I sit down") sums up all of Romanticism, the feeling and the act of sitting down, the sign of a tired generation2. He finds the poem fluent and admirable, but in it one sees nothing precise. He contrasts this chosen solitude of the Romantic aristocrat with that of Rousseau, who was cut off from the company of men3. He associates Lamartine with the voluptuousness of melancholy, then in fashion, which he distinguishes from Baudelairean spleen4. He considers him graver than Musset and closer to Racine than to Rimbaud. He recalls his political commitment as head of the provisional government in 1848 and his journey to the Orient. Finally, he quotes the line "Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé" ("One single being is missing and the whole world is empty") to shed light on Clouscard's solitude5.

1. 1Hegel on the Beach 1/51 Feb 2016 · 15:16
2. 2Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics20 May 2022 · 25:11
3. 3#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 1:24:51
4. 4#16 Programme music, pure music10 Mar 2021 · 1:02:24
5. 5Why is Clouscard indispensable?3 Jan 2023 · 11:59

Summary produced automatically from 35 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.