Patrizia Ames

Celebrated among the French Romantics for his "poetry of the soul," lyric meditations that united passion, philosophy, and religious humanism, Alphonse de Lamartine was also a novelist and statesman who served in various diplomatic and elected positions before retiring in disgust at Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1851.

Poetry, Lamartine said, echoes our deepest intuitions and intelligence: it is a sincere expression of the whole human being. Much of his own poetry draws on personal life, and The Lake, whose lyrical passion inspired a generation of French Romantics, recalls a brief but intense love affair between the poet and a young married woman, Julie Charles. Meeting one summer when both were at a health resort on Lake Bourget in the French Alps, they separated over the winter but promised to meet again the next year. When the poet returned to the lake, however, Julie was already dying and the poet found himself alone. The Lake is Lamartine’s elegy to his lost love, a melodious complaint that moves from the intimate situation of two lovers to a meditation on nature and time.