La rhétorique au cœur du romantisme: Méditations poétiques d’Alphonse de Lamartine

Abstract

Abstract Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques (1820) is considered the first manifesto of French Romanticism, a moment of „rupture“ and „unprecedented renewal of the sensibility of an era“ (Aurélie Loiseleur). While not denying the inventiveness of the author who claimed to have given his muse „not a conventional seven-stringed lyre, but the very fibres of the human heart“, the article aims to reconsider the role of rhetoric in Lamartine’s Méditations. Understood as a method of invention and arrangement of poetic material, rhetoric informs many of the poems in the volume, particularly those in which the lyrical subject resorts to the deliberative topics for apologetic purposes. Furthermore, the article argues that Lamartine’s rhetoric owes much to that of the Jesuits from whom the poet received his education.