ABSTRACT
The journey from Fenelon's ancient Greece to Chateaubriand's New World, from Calypso's tantalizing island to the mysterious banks of the Meschacebe, via the terra incognita of eighteenth-century prose poems, allows for the reappraisal of a poetic genre invented in the Enlightenment as an instalment of critique and rebellion—literary, religious, and socio-political. Mapping this voyage did not reveal a linear trajectory from a postclassical to a lyric Enlightenment, as the dawn of Romanticism might have tempted us to read retrospectively, but rather the complex ebb and flow of the tide of modernity reshaping classical shores. Before Mentor pushed Telemachus off a cliff into the ocean's "bitter waters" to wake him up from his infatuation with Eucharis's beauty and to cause him to resume his search for Ulysses, the young hero had begged for a final farewell to the nymph whom he loathed to abandon.
