The Role Of Classicism In Romantic Literature

When faced with the rejection of the Catholic religion and secular ideas of the period of Enlightment, romantic heroes lived many mystical adventures and discovered the beauty of religion. For example, in Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo, the lector was a witness of a miraculous encounter between a criminal and a priest, who is able to transform the wanted former detainee Jean Valjean into the illustrious Mr. Madeleine.
But the Romanticism is not only a reaction to the period of Enlightment. Romantic writers and poets also seek to disrupt and break the restrictions of the classicism by renewing the form of their writings, for example, and making everything more accessible to the grand public. The language of romanticism is therefore simple and

Hugo, 1827, is one of the founding texts of Romanticism and founds the principles of a new theatrical genre: the romantic drama (le drame romantique). This is the beginning of a violent quarrel between the classics - also called wigs - and the romantic – also known as shaggy hair - which will burst during the first performance of Hernani on February 25, 1830. The battle of Hernani is the first victory of the Romantic Movement over the classicism.
Hugo wrights: « J’ai disloqué, ce grand niais, d’alexandrin » ("I dislocated, this great silly, Alexandrine")
The Alexandrine is a measure of time in poetry that counts twelve syllables, pronounced until the beginning of the 19th century with an interruption at the hemistich, that is to say counting “two six syllables”. Hugo dislocated the Alexandrine in Hernani and sowed discord by pronouncing his alexandrine in three times, that is to say in “three times four syllables”.

Thought on the rule of three units (V. Hugo, La Préface de Cromwell,

For the Symbolists, the individual is crossed by a thought that exceeds him, and the poet must relay both and not focus on his own person. The symbolist poet puts himself at the disposal of thought.

« Je suis né poète, je me suis reconnu poète, ce n’est pas du tout de ma faute » ("I was born poet, I recognized myself a poet, it is not at all my fault") says Rimbaud to Izambard (May 13th, 1871), and thus accentuates the involuntary nature of creation.
The symbolist poems are the fruit of a long gestational work, where an illumination is needed, as we can see in Larme, 1872, Rimbaud. Thus, when romantic poets chose this path, Rimbaud assured that being a poet is a gift of birth and despised those who self-proclaim without actually being one.
Finally, the Symbolist poet does not suppress the possibility of failure and death does not scare him, unlike the romantic. The limits and the defeats of the poet are counterbalanced by the hope and the continuation of the adventure.
For the first time, the symbolists enlightened the notion of progress in