Authors: Victor Hugo
ISBN-13: 9780559526466, ISBN-10: 0559526466
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: BiblioBazaar
Date Published: November 2008
Edition: (Non-applicable)
"If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away," the larger-than-life Victor Hugo once confessed. Indeed, this 19th-century French master's works -- from the epic drama Les Misérables to the classic unrequited love story The Hunchback of Notre Dame -- have spanned the ages, their themes of morality and redemption ever applicable to our times.
For most of his life, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was the most famous writer in the world. His legacy includes the nineteenth century's most celebrated works of drama, fiction, memoir, and criticism. But in his day Hugo was know foremost as a poet-indeed the greatest French poet of the age. He wrote with passion about history, erotic experience, familial love, philosophy, nature, social justice, art, and mysticism.
In this new bicentennial edition, acclaimed poet and translator Brooks Haxton offers an exquisite selection of Hugo's finest work: love poems, historical tableaux, elegy, and idyll, including his incomparable "Boaz Asleep," which Marcel Proust praised as the most beautiful poem of the nineteenth century.
"One of those rare and providential minds who in the domain of literature bring about the salvation of us all." (Charles Baudelaire)
To My Odes | 3 | |
The Captive | 5 | |
Moonlight | 9 | |
The Djinns | 11 | |
Reverie | 17 | |
Rapture | 19 | |
The Slope of Reverie | 21 | |
Setting Suns (II) | 29 | |
Setting Suns (VI) | 31 | |
To the Column | 33 | |
To Albrecht Durer | 39 | |
'The war that scoundrel wages ...' | 41 | |
The Cow | 43 | |
'Just as in a forest's drowsy pools ... ' | 45 | |
Written on the pane of a Flemish window | 45 | |
Olympio's Sadness | 47 | |
Oceano Nox | 55 | |
June Nights | 59 | |
Memory of the Night of the Fourth | 61 | |
What the poet said to himself in 1848 | 63 | |
The Expiation | 65 | |
To the People | 85 | |
Stella | 87 | |
'Blow forever, trumpets of thought ... ' | 89 | |
'It was raining that night ... ' | 91 | |
'The poet goes away into the fields ... ' | 95 | |
My Two Daughters | 95 | |
'The clarity that fills ... ' | 97 | |
To Andre Chenier | 99 | |
Life in the Fields | 99 | |
Reply to an Act of Accusation | 105 | |
Vere Novo | 115 | |
The Party at Therese's | 115 | |
'Happy the man ... ' | 121 | |
A Stop in the Middle of a Walk | 121 | |
The Spinning Wheel of Omphale | 125 | |
Letter | 127 | |
Words Spoken in the Shadows | 129 | |
Written on the Bottom of a Crucifix | 131 | |
'Seeing her grandmother occupied spinning wool ... ' | 131 | |
Magnitudo Parvi | 131 | |
'I felt I had gone mad ... ' | 135 | |
'She had formed this habit ... ' | 135 | |
'She was place ... ' | 137 | |
'Oh spring! oh dawn! on memories! ... ' | 139 | |
Veni, Vidi, Vixi | 143 | |
'Tomorrow, at dawn ... ' | 145 | |
At Villequier | 147 | |
Mors | 155 | |
The Beggar | 157 | |
Words on the Dunes | 159 | |
Mugitusque Boum | 161 | |
'I paid the fisherman ... ' | 163 | |
Shepherds and Flocks | 165 | |
'I gathered this flower for you on the hill ... ' | 167 | |
'Strophe of the poet ... ' | 169 | |
'A shade was waiting ... ' | 171 | |
'One day the solemn spirit ... ' | 173 | |
Clearing | 173 | |
Nomen, Numen, Lumen | 175 | |
To the One Who Stayed Behind in France | 177 | |
Sowing Season, Evening | 197 | |
'The troop of children read and spell ... ' | 197 | |
The Lion's Midday Sleep | 201 | |
'I'm setting out to narrate that horrific year ... ' | 203 | |
On Top of Paris's Ramparts | 203 | |
1 January | 205 | |
Letter to a Woman | 205 | |
Open Windows | 211 | |
Jeannine Asleep ('She's asleep ... ') | 211 | |
Conscience | 215 | |
Boaz Asleep | 217 | |
Christ's First Encounter with the Tomb | 223 | |
The Hydra | 229 | |
Mohammed | 229 | |
The Parricide | 229 | |
The Work of the Prisoners | 237 | |
The Infanta's Rose | 241 | |
After the Battle | 253 | |
The Sister of Mercy | 255 | |
After the Battle of the Caudine Forks | 257 | |
Et Nox Facta Est | 259 | |
'The hexameter ... ' | 261 | |
The Theophile Gautier | 261 | |
Notes | 267 | |
Index of Titles | 296 | |
Index of First Lines | 301 |