‘Le Maître’, ‘le géant’, ‘invincible’, ‘incomparable artisan’, ‘parfait artiste’ are all terms which French poets have used to acknowledge Hugo's greatness. By any standards, he is the colossus of nineteenth-century French literature: his poetic career, in a massively sustained surge of creative energy, spanned over sixty-five years; endlessly versatile, he wrote plays, novels, as well as poems; in his poetry, he tapped every lyrical source, plunged fearlessly into the cauldron of satirical verse (Les Châtiments, 1853), produced epic frescoes of human history (La Légende des Siècles, 1859, 1877, 1883), wrote frivolous, exotic, erotic and impressionistic pictorial poems, and explored a vast range of verse-forms.

Partly because of the sheer volume of his work, much of it lax and with a tendency towards facile self-repetition, many modern critics have been grudging about Hugo's achievement: the novelist Gide, asked who was France's greatest poet, replied ‘Hugo, hélas!’. But his influence on modern French poetry is indubitable. For the Hugo who emerges from Les Contemplations (1856) is the major propagator of that spirit of inquiry which is subsequently to suffuse the work of a Rimbaud, a Mallarmé, a Supervielle or even a Michaux, and in which poetic vision becomes a vital instrument in man's relations with his own beyond, not merely an aesthetic colouring. Many of Hugo's poems are a cosmic confrontation: on the bare dunes or beetling cliffs of the Channel Isles, he apprehends the vulnerability of man and probes the mystery and threat of the bottomless reaches of space.