Published: 2024-12-31

Zola’s unedited poems: a prelude to the “tough tool of prose”

Anna Kaczmarek-Wiśniewska Logo ORCID

Abstract

While he was young, Emile Zola regarded himself as a poet and wrote several thousand lines of poetry. Then, having turned definitely to prose, he judged his poetry poor and undistinguished. Therefore, his poems have never been  edited, except some fragments published by his friend Paul 
Alexis in 1882. The paper analyzes some motives (cyclic structure, the ideal of feminine beauty and of scenery, attitude towards God) appearing in Zola’s poetry in order to prove they recur in the writer’s novels, especially in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Thus, the poems by young Zola
may be regarded as a prelude to his prose works.

Keywords:

Zola , poetry , cycle , woman , scenery , God

Citation rules

Kaczmarek-Wiśniewska, A. (2024). Zola’s unedited poems: a prelude to the “tough tool of prose”. Romanica Silesiana, 26(2), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.31261/RS.2024.26.08

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Vol. 26 No. 2 (2024)
Published: 2025-12-01


ISSN: 1898-2433
eISSN: 2353-9887

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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