Louise Colet's poetry evolved through the course of her work, but there are several consistent themes that emerge when viewing her work as a whole. The most important characteristic in Colet's poetry is her source of inspiration: Colet was a writer very strongly tied to the real and the familiar. Her works often centered on recent historical events of relevance to her, particularly the French Revolution. The rest of Colet's works drew on more personal themes, dealing with the literary figures that surrounded her: Flaubert; Sand; Musset; Cousin; and many others.

The personal nature of these works strongly affected the themes as well. Love, equality in relationships, betrayal, death- it was there that Colet found her stories, which varied between the realistic and the romanticized. One such poem, "Song of Heloise," was written as Colet's relationship with Victor Cousin began: The poem exhalted their love in a manner that would have been considered quite intimate for the time.

Colet's poems often took a moral stance on society at the time as well. In one such work, La Satire du siecle, she chastened the new Parisian emphasis on an excessive material lifestyle, which caused many to ruin themselves by flaunting wealth beyond their means.

Bills and debts succeed love letters.
Unable to pay them, one leaves them unread;
Then creditors start their barking;
Its pack of hounds is implacable; they stalk their prey.
Menace it, insult it, and pitilessly crush it.

In other works, Colet flaunted conventional morality by expressing decidedly feminist sentiment:

Oh, divine grandeur of women,
In whom are incarnated the souls
That throb throughout infinity.
The most immortal bards-
Dante, Goethe, Homer, Shakespeare-
Emerged from our wombs.
For it is the maternal essence
That imbues humanity
From the highest to the humblest.

This poem, and others where Colet departs from the personal and tackles more universal themes, is one of her greater works. Victor Hugo offered her the advice to take her poems and "purge them of all that is personal." However, she never truly reached that goal, and most of her works gain far more meaning analyzed within the context of her own experience. When first approaching any of her works, a reader should first look for parallels within Colet's own life and put it the work in the context of Colet's traumatic love life, from which so many of her poems and stories emerge.