Victor Hugo's Leopoldine Poems

by Julie Kane (translator)

While Americans know Victor Hugo from novels such as Les Miserables or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he was also the greatest Romantic poet of France. In 1843 Hugo's oldest child, 19-year-old Leopoldine, died in a boating accident on the Seine River with her husband and their unborn child. Over the next decade, Hugo wrote compulsively about his daughter's life and death in poems that foreshadow the Confessional movement of the next century. Here, for the first time in English, is the complete sequence of 17 Leopoldine poems and the complete story that was sketched in part in the famous Francois Truffaut film about Leopoldine's younger sister, The Story of Adele H. Julie Kane is a Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing. She was a winner in the National Poetry Series for her book, Rhythm & Booze.

180 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2006

About the author

Julie Kane is a contemporary American poet, scholar, and editor. She was the Louisiana Poet Laureate for the 2011–2013 term.

Although born in Massachusetts, Kane has lived in Louisiana for over three decades and writes about the region with the doubled consciousness of a non-native. Her work shows the influence of the Confessional poets; indeed, she was a student in Anne Sexton's graduate poetry seminar at Boston University at the time of Sexton's suicide. She is also associated with the New Formalist movement in contemporary poetry, although she has published free verse as well as formal verse. Her formal poems tend to bend the "rules" of poetic forms and employ slant rhyme.

She is the winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize, judged by Louise Glück. Other awards include the Lewis P. Simpson Award, the 2002 National Poetry Series for Rhythm & Booze (selected by Maxine Kumin), and the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize.