Though Louis Boulanger was known as one of the standard-bearers for visual Romanticism – considered within the community as equal to his comrade Delacroix for a number of years – he also had a strong literary bent. Here is one of his few surviving poems, dedicated to the Romanticist literary critic Saint-Beuve and originally published in an anthology published by the female Romanticist poet Marie Mennessier-Nodier, whose father Charles Nodier was one of the movement's chief strategists and thinkers:
To My Friend Sainte-Beuve, (1836)
No, I have not received that highest gift of grace
That makes the work, when all else dies and is effaced
Stand yet, immortal, so that at some distant date
The glory of the author scintillates as bright
As on those grand days where the town, with solemn rites,
Parades his compositions brought to consecrate.
But nonetheless these Florentines, Genius' elect,
That true to life your Muse before my view projects,
Come often with their light that drowns and leaves me stunned,
And then at times, alas! My spirit has aspired
To believe, poor fool, that one ray of that fire
Piercing through its shade, would render it fecund.
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