Alphonse de Lamartine's Le Dernier Chant du…
1825 CE
Alphonse de Lamartine's Le Dernier Chant du pèlerinage d’Harold (The Last Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), published in 1825, reveals the charm that the late English poet Lord Byron exerts over him.
Byron’s European admirers scoop it up.
An aristocratic scion who had served briefly in the military guard of Louis XVIII, Lamartine had published his first volume of verse, the lyrical and intensely personal Meditations poetiques, in 1820 to immediate acclaim.
Méditations, whose themes are at once intimate and religious, has brought a new tone to French poetry, enjoying immense success because of its new romantic tone and sincerity of feeling.
The book was so successful that Lamartine had attempted to extend it two years later with his Nouvelles méditations poétiques and his Mort de Socrates—based on Plato's Phaedo—, in which his preoccupation with metaphysics first becomes evident.
These works had not been as enthusiastically received as his first collection of verse.
Born in Mâcon, Burgundy on October 21, 1790, his family is part of the French provincial nobility, and he had spent his youth at the family estate.
Lamartine had married Maria Ann Birch, a young Englishwoman connected by marriage to the Churchills, in 1820.
The same year he had published his first collection of poetry, Méditations poétiques, and finally joined the diplomatic corps, as secretary to the French embassy at Naples.
Lamartine is famous for his partly autobiographical poem, "Le lac" ("The Lake"), which describes in retrospect the fervent love shared by a couple from the point of view of the bereaved man.