First Poetic Works and New Poetic Works by Alfred de Musset

First published:Poésies nouvelles, 1840; Premières poésies, 1840; definitive edition, 1852 (English translation, 1905)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

In 1852, the whole body of Alfred de Musset’s poetry was gathered into two volumes and published as the First Poetic Works and New Poetic Works. The first volume is made up of Romances of Spain and Italy (1829) and A Show from an Easy Chair (1833). The second collection contains pieces written after 1833. It is worth recalling that by 1840, when the poet was thirty years old, Musset’s creative talents were virtually exhausted. A complete explanation of this premature exhaustion should not be sought in the character of Musset’s poetic doctrine. However, in the light of Musset’s stated belief that the greatness of verse was commensurate with the magnitude of the poet’s suffering and the intensity of his emotion, it will be readily understood that his creative talent was likely to fade relatively early.

Only a handful of people turned up for Musset’s funeral in 1857. This seems remarkable now, in the light of Musset’s continuing popular appeal both as poet and as dramatist. It is all the more remarkable in view of the enthusiastic welcome given him by the members of the Romantic Cénacle when he first joined the group in 1828. His precocious poetic talent and dazzling wit could not, and did not, fail to impress its members.

Musset’s Romances of Spain and Italy was written after the first collected works of Victor Hugo were available. Just as it is of little moment that Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829; Les Orientales: Or, Eastern Lyrics, 1879) was inspired by his watching the sun set over Paris, so it matters little that when Musset’s collection first appeared, he was not familiar with either Spain or Italy. The brightness and color of these countries, remembered or imagined, appealed to the young Romantics seeking a vivid contrast with the drabness of France in their day; Spain and Italy provided a rich backcloth in front of which intense passion could be appropriately represented.

The poems for which Musset is best known are the series of four “Nights”: “The Night of May,” “The Night of December,” “The Night of August,” and “The Night of October.” All four relate directly to his turbulent, unhappy love affair with the novelist George Sand. Although it is easy to exaggerate the effect of this liaison on Musset, it does seem certain that he was deeply marked by it and that subsequent affairs even served to remind him of it.

The four “Nights” contain some of the finest lyrical passages that may be found in French verse. They take the dramatic form of dialogues between the poet and his Muse, with the latter acting as a confidant who listens, advises, and consoles.

In “The Night of May,” the Spring Muse vainly begs the poet to give form to his suffering in a work of art; by so doing, he will participate in the rites of creation and eternal renewal taking place around him. At first, the poet thinks he is only imagining the voice of the Muse, but little by little it grows louder and more urgent, and he clearly makes out the words “Poet, take thy lute.” The Muse despairs of banishing the poet’s indolence, after insisting, however, that his very unhappiness would have been a guarantee of the beauty of his verse: “The most desperate songs are the most beautiful;/ I know some immortal ones that are pure sobs.” The poet breaks his silence to claim that the weight of his grief is such that no form of expression can bear it: “But I have suffered a hard martyrdom/ And the least I might say about it,/ Were I to try it on my lute,/ Would break it like a reed.”

“The Night of December” presents, beside the poet, a mysterious companion who follows him through all the stages of his life. This brother reveals himself to be the image of loneliness. In “The Night of August” a happier note is struck, for the work is a hymn of praise to the forces of life that allow human beings to recover from the setbacks in life. However, “The Night of October” contains a return to anguish for the poet. He knows once more wrath and despair; he realizes that he did not in fact recover from his unhappy love affair.

In his series of “Nights,” Musset seems to have moved away from the mainstream of the nineteenth century Romantic movement. However, in doing so, he renews contact with some of the resources of Romanticism in its ageless aspects. For here the poet places himself at the center of his poetic meditation and, in representing himself as sincerely and directly as possible, admits the reader to a position of privileged intimacy. The reader feels in sympathy with the poet. Musset’s sincere, lyrical laying bare of the emotions in the form of confidential poetry was to be imitated frequently in the course of the nineteenth century.

The emotion that recurs most frequently in Musset’s verse is love, which is generally associated with suffering and a form of regret. A partial explanation of Musset’s considerable popularity may doubtless be sought in the lucidity with which he was able to analyze his sufferings and their causes. It is this lucidity and the regret that it provokes that make Musset’s unhappiness especially poignant. One of the most moving illustrations of this sincere self-analysis, from which all trace of oratory or rhetoric is excluded, may be found in the short piece entitled “Sadness.” This sonnet, collected in the New Poetic Works, was written in June, 1840. It is a confession of failure in life: a loss of pride, a wasting of energy, and a sense of shame about the whole situation: “I have wasted my strength and my life,/ I have lost my friends, my gaiety;/ I have even lost my pride/ Which gave confidence in my genius.” The simplicity of the language, its power to suggest the repentance of the sinner, reminds the reader of similar confessions by François Villon four hundred years earlier.

In Musset, the dramatist often coexists with the poet, and it is difficult to separate the two. This is readily evident in the dramatic dialogue employed in the “Nights.” Regrettably, it also shows up in oratorical aspects of these poems. The double role of poet and dramatist seems part of a greater dualism and even dichotomy in Musset. On one hand, he was truly a child of his century, containing within himself many of its contradictions and much of its anguish. On the other hand, he was an admirer of the great French classics, too aware of the tradition of French letters ever to subscribe completely to the doctrines of the Romantic Cénacle. Some of the distrust with which he came to be viewed by members of the group may be explained by his mischievously parodying some of their excesses. If it is valid to talk of Musset as a poet aiming at a free transfer of emotion from himself to his reader, it is yet necessary to remark that irony and whimsical, critical detachment are also components of Musset’s poetic repertory.

“A Wasted Evening,” about an evening at the theater, is one of Musset’s finest poems. It has the tone of a conversation. Whereas in other pieces by Musset one might regret the absence of those elements of density and surprise often held to be essential to a poem, here they are much in evidence. The poem is related to a precise circumstance in his life: a performance of Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1666; The Misanthrope, 1709) in Paris in 1840. Musset proceeds from an ironic, effective treatment of current tastes in the theater: “I was alone, the other evening, at the Théâtre-Français,/ Or almost alone; the author had but little success./ Of course, it was just Molière.” Then, in masterly fashion, he weaves in a new theme: The glimpse of a girl in the theater brings to mind a phrase from the poet André Chénier. This is enough to distract the poet from the task he set himself: to rehabilitate and to imitate the talent of the seventeenth century dramatist. Musset succeeds admirably here in calling to life an atmosphere and in making a concise, critical commentary on the tastes of men of his day. Moreover, he shows up strikingly the problem of his personal, artistic indolence.

That flippancy and irony were studied techniques becomes obvious in a piece such as “Upon Three Steps of Marble,” a poem composed in 1849. The title refers to the stairs of the terrace of the Orangerie at Versailles. The beginning of the poem is a disrespectful description of the palace and park of Versailles:

I do not believe that there is on earth a place. . . . . . . . . . . . . .More described, more lauded, more sungThan the boring park of Versailles.

The flippant beginning, with its implicit criticism of descriptive poetry, gives way, however, to a magnificent evocation of the century of Louis XIV, with which Musset patently feels considerable spiritual affinity.

When Musset’s name is mentioned, regret is often expressed. It is felt by many readers that with a more sustained effort, he could have accomplished far more than he did, that his life of dissipation must be deplored. Some have the impression that Musset’s emotional development never moved far beyond adolescence. The poet himself hints at this possibility in an address to the reader in the First Poetic Works: “My first poems are those of a child/ The second of an adolescent/ The last scarcely of a man.” Even if this is true, and it seems possible, it is to be remembered that Musset is in good company. It could perhaps be shown that many great poets, although they did not write during their actual adolescence, frequently referred to it, consciously or unconsciously, as their primary source of inspiration.

Bibliography

Barine, Arvède. The Life of Alfred de Musset. Translated by Charles Conner Hayden. New York: Edwin C. Hill, 1906. Important early work on the writer, still highly useful for scholars and general readers. Describes the young Musset’s growing awareness of his poetic talents and discusses the production of works that would be included in his two collections.

Brookner, Anita. “Alfred de Musset: Enfant du siècle.” In Romanticism and Its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Examines the works of Musset and other French Romantic writers and artists. Argues that the Romantics created an imaginary world in order to attain fulfillment in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleon I’s defeat at Waterloo.

Denomme, Robert T. “Alfred de Musset and the Poetry of Experience.” In Nineteenth-Century French Romantic Poets. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Discusses the significance of human love as an informing principle in Musset’s poetry. Focuses on the poet’s attempts to capture the intensity of experience in his art.

Grant, Elliott M. French Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Briefly outlines the composition process for poems included in these volumes. Reproduces selected poems and explicates them for general readers, focusing on technical and thematic issues.

Haldane, Charlotte. Alfred: The Passionate Life of Alfred de Musset. New York: Roy, 1961. Offers perceptive commentary on Musset’s poetry. Explains the genesis for many of his poems and interprets a number of them in detail.

Sedgwick, Henry Dwight. Alfred de Musset, 1810-1857. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931. A detailed study of the writer’s life that interweaves commentary on the poems into the biographical narrative. Explains the source of Musset’s inspiration for a number of the works included in his collections.

Wakefield, David. The French Romantics: Literature and the Visual Arts, 1800-1840. London: Chaucer, 2007. Wakefield’s study of the French Romantic movement devotes a chapter to Musset, discussing his ideas about literature and art and his influence on painting.