67

The first years of the nineteenth century were characterized by the publication of many poetic dictionaries: these volumes were made to appeal to verse-makers of all stripes and purported to offer, in a single volume, the essence of poetic language. These dictionaries contained not only a classification of rhymes, but also epithets and set phrases that tended to confine a given poetic word to “ready-made” sentences that were also the stuff of future clichés. This article aims to study the role played by poetic dictionaries in shaping romantic clichés, in order to understand how two poets from the first half of the nineteenth century, Lamartine and Hugo, could simultaneously use this poetic language (which was considered stereotyped), modify it, and create, from this material, new phrases, which then went on to become clichés themselves.