Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Complete Works of Voltaire) 83

This volume presents all of Voltaire’s poetry for which a year of composition is unknown. It is composed exclusively of short pieces which provide an opportunity to study the place of shorter verse in Voltaire’s corpus. Voltaire’s impromptus, odes and epistles were often penned on specific occasions and given as gifts to friends and acquaintances, some well known, like Madame du Châtelet, others much more mysterious. As the author’s reputation grew these short pieces became sought-after commodities: people would save them, and some would be copied and circulated to the wider public.