Hugo à l’oreille Verlaine et l’intimité du premier romantisme

Two Victor Hugos coexist in Verlaine’s poetic and critical imaginary. One is the intimate poet of Romanticism of 1830; the other is the public figure whose work in Les Châtiments and L’Année terrible mixes poetry and politics in a way Verlaine thought ineffective. This article reviews Verlaine’s interest, in Romances sans paroles, in the first Hugo’s formal inventiveness–a collection in which such attention to the past is, to say the least, unexpected.