The publication in 1820 of Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques seemed to introduce in Restoration France a feminine voice – intimate, suffering and elegiac – into the very virile world of poetic print. That a true poetic femininity was affirming its presence in those years, many thought so, and this feeling was reinforced by the emergence of a generation of female poets who were immediately known and recognised. This new place for women was part of an editorial context characterized by increased competition. As part of product innovation strategies, some booksellers structured a real market for poetic gift books for ladies, and thus contributed to the commercial promotion of minor literary forms. In many respects, the individual collection of the Romantic period was part of this economy of gift books, from a material, commercial and literary point of view, while at the same time producing a major symbolic break, since the feminine was no longer merely a space for reception, but also became an instance of production. This article therefore proposes to interpret the transformation of the idea of poetry between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as the product of the editorial changes of the period. The result was a crisis in the pattern of poetic virility inherited from the Old Regime: it was indeed during the Romantic period that an association was established between poetry and femininity which, far from benefiting women, paradoxically reinforced the logic of male domination in this field.