Les poèmes inédits de Zola : un prélude au « rude outil de la prose »

While he was young, Emile Zola regarded himself as a poet and wrote several thousand lines of poetry. Then, having turned definitely to prose, he judged his poetry poor and undistinguished. Therefore, his poems have never been edited, except some fragments published by his friend Paul Alexis in 1882. The paper analyzes some motives (cyclic structure, the ideal of feminine beauty and of scenery, attitude towards God) appearing in Zola’s poetry in order to prove they recur in the writer’s novels, especially in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Thus, the poems by young Zolamay be regarded as a prelude to his prose works.