The poet and the seamstress, or on the destiny of poetry

This book closes with an exploration of renowned Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine’s sentimental social novel Geneviève (1851), focusing on its explicit reference to the seamstress and poet Reine Garde. After claiming to have abandoned poetry in favor of a more “virile” prose, Lamartine attempted to produce a series of novels aimed specifically at working-class readers. I read Garde’s poetry against the novel’s preface (Lamartine’s biographical account of his encounter with the poet herself) and sentimental narrative to show the emergence of distinctions between high and low culture, as they relate to questions of both genre and gender.