Life & Wisdom Quote by Victor Hugo

"The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real"

Victor Hugo, Author

About this Quote

Hugo draws a tidy map of literature that’s really a manifesto in disguise: genres aren’t just containers for stories, they’re engines powered by different kinds of belief. The ode “lives upon the ideal” because lyric praise depends on a chosen illusion - the poet elevates, simplifies, and polishes until the subject becomes emblem rather than merely human. The epic “upon the grandiose” points to scale as a moral technology: larger-than-life deeds, cosmic stakes, nations and gods. Grandeur isn’t decoration; it’s how epics persuade audiences that history has a shape and that power can look like destiny.

Then Hugo lands the sharpest claim: drama lives “upon the real.” Not realism as drab reportage, but the stage’s dependence on friction you can recognize - desires colliding, social roles tightening like a noose, consequences arriving on time. Drama can borrow ideals and pageantry, but it dies without the pressure of plausibility: bodies in a room, voices that can’t be edited, choices that can’t be narrated away.

Context matters. Hugo is the Romantic who helped blow up France’s neoclassical rulebook, arguing for a theater that welcomed contradiction: the sublime next to the grotesque, the heroic shadowed by the everyday. This line subtly justifies that revolution. If drama’s medium is the real, then it must admit real life’s mess: class, vulgarity, laughter, violence. It’s also a quiet power move, crowning drama as the most socially consequential form - the one that can’t hide behind mythic distance, because it speaks from the crowd to the crowd.

Quote Details

Topic	Poetry
Source	Victor Hugo, Préface de Cromwell (1827) , contains the French line: L'ode vit de l'idéal, l'épopée du grandiose, le drame du réel; commonly translated as 'The ode lives upon the ideal; the epic upon the grandiose; the drama upon the real'.

More Quotes by Victor Add to List

About the Author

Victor Hugo

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

131 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"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

Victor Hugo

"If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it"

Lascelles Abercrombie, Poet

"The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero"

Maxwell Anderson, Playwright

"Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life"

Lascelles Abercrombie, Poet

"When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature"

George P. Baker, Writer

George P. Baker

"The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths"

Gilbert Murray, Diplomat

"If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama"

Lillian Hellman, Dramatist

"An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative"

Lascelles Abercrombie, Poet

"The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic"

Pierre Corneille, Dramatist

Pierre Corneille

"Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations"

Horace Walpole, Author

"Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them"

John Drinkwater, Poet

"By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made"

Lascelles Abercrombie, Poet

"The key element in tragedy is that heroes and heroines are destroyed by that which appears to be their greatest strength"

Robert Shea, Author

"Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

Benjamin Disraeli

"Christianity makes of life a moral drama in which we play a starring role and in which the most ordinary events take on a grand significance"

Dinesh D'Souza, Author

"All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side"

Marguerite Young, Author

"Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey"

Raymond Queneau, Poet

"A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration"

Richard Schickel, Author

"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real"

Jean Baudrillard, Sociologist

"He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger"

Salvatore Quasimodo, Author