Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was born in Besançon and became the leading figure of French Romanticism, as poet, novelist and dramatist. His early odes won royalist favour, but after Napoleon III's coup of December 1851 he went into exile in Jersey and then Guernsey, remaining abroad until 1870. From there he published the satirical Les Châtiments (1853), the elegiac Les Contemplations (1856) and the epic sequence La Légende des siècles (1859–83).

The English shown here is drawn from the anthology Poems by Victor Hugo (1888), in which many hands render single poems from his collections. Only those poems whose translator is named in that book's contents are included; each carries the translator's name as printed there, and the original French incipit is recorded in the Codex Note.