Life & Wisdom Quote by Victor Hugo

"The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both"

Victor Hugo, Author

About this Quote

Hugo is lobbying for a takeover. By calling drama "complete poetry", he isn’t merely complimenting the stage; he’s crowning it the form that finishes what other genres only begin. The word "germ" is doing sly work here: it shrinks the epic and the ode into embryos, admirable but incomplete, while drama gets to be the grown organism - plural, hybrid, fully metabolizing lyric intensity and narrative sweep.

This is also a Romantic-era power play against the older French hierarchy of genres, where tragedy and comedy came with strict rules and poetry was policed by decorum. Hugo, the great insurgent of French letters, wanted the theater to be a democratic engine: a place where the intimate and the public collide, where speech becomes music without losing the mess of life. When he says drama "epitomizes both", he’s arguing that the stage is poetry under pressure. It contains the ode’s concentrated feeling and the epic’s panoramic world-building, then adds the missing ingredient: bodies, conflict, time. Drama forces ideas to take consequences.

The subtext is polemical and strategic. Hugo isn’t offering neutral taxonomy; he’s defending the Romantic drama he helped popularize - a form that could mix registers, smash classical unities, and let the sublime sit next to the grotesque. In that sense, "complete" is less a description than a manifesto: drama as the most modern poetry because it can hold contradictions without tidying them away.

Quote Details

Topic	Poetry
Source	Preface to Cromwell (Préface de Cromwell), Victor Hugo, 1827 — original French preface contains the line 'Le drame est la poésie complète...'; standard authoritative source for this aphorism.
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Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885) was a Author from France.

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