This volume of essays, written by scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints, presents a fresh approach to the study of nineteenth-century French poetry. Each of the eleven essays, on different poets from Lamartine to Mallarmé and Laforgue, focuses on the detailed organisation of a single poem. The method of close reading has been adopted in order to effect an introduction to the analysis of the 'basics' of poetic language (sound, metre, syntax, etc.), and in order to explore and illustrate some of the claims and arguments about poetry arising from developments in the prevailing literary theory. Theoretical positions are posed and tested in the terms of practical analysis and interpretation. Christopher Prendergast's introduction to the volume situates the essays in a series of general perspectives and contexts, and Clive Scott has provided an appendix on French versification.

"I can well imagine a course on the advanced undergraduate and/or masters level being built around this book, with each chapter supplemented by an additional article or two on the same poem for purposes of comparison and poems referred to secondarily in the text examined in greater detail." Charles D. Minahen, SubStance

"...presents, as it intends to do, a clear, thorough, and intelligent introduction to contemporary literary theory and to what have long in fact figured among its preferred critical objects, nineteenth-century poetic texts." Mary Lewis Shaw, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

"This is an important collection....the writers of these essays have directed their efforts at all-encompassing readings that leave the reader satisfied that the texts in question have been examined in a thorough manner, with a genuine concern for an understanding of the poems in their entirety. The essays in this collection will undoubtedly encourage the students' efforts to understand the intricacies of French poetry and to appreciate the richness of the many theoretical approaches at their disposal." William Thompson, European Romantic Review