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Our new translation of Selected Poems by Victor Hugo can be browsed and downloaded here.

Hugo's poetry ranges over personal, philosophical, political and social themes. The personal aspects were deepened by the premature loss of his recently-married daughter in 1843 and his internal religious and philosophical struggles; the political and social aspects by his republican sympathies and the turbulent events of French nineteenth-century politics. In this selection the personal dominates, rather than the political or religious, revealing the calmer more introspective aspect of the poet invoked in Les Misèrables, particularly in the figure of Jean Valjean with whom he identified spiritually, rather than the polemical and rhetorical aspects which guaranteed his fame.