Unacknowledged Legislators The Poet As Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France

Unacknowledged Legislators presents an original and detailed history of the theory and practice of French poetry from 1750 through to the end of the Romantic Period. It focuses on five major writers of the post-revolutionary period: Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël, who set the most influential agendas for poetry in the Romantic period; and Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny, the three most important French lyric poets before Baudelaire. The Romantic figure ofthe poet as priest and prophet is now dismissed as an uninteresting cliché, but this book demonstrates for the first time how the figure of the poet as lawgiver was central to the theory and practice of poetryduring this period. It ends by pointing to the enduring importance of the poet-lawgiver in post-Romantic and Symbolist conceptions of poetry.