Alfred de Musset Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lloyd Bishop

Critical Essay by Lloyd Bishop

SOURCE: Bishop, Lloyd. “After 1830: A Poet of Many Styles and Genres.” In The Poetry of Alfred de Musset: Styles and Genres, pp. 17-52. New York: Peter Lang, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Bishop presents a survey of Musset's poetic genres and styles, including his short lyric poetry, narrative and dramatic verse, and Les nuits cycle.

Shorter Poems

Musset's shorter pieces are written in many different genres: elegy, sonnet, rondeau, madrigal, chanson, romance, ballad, epigram, epistle, billet, impromptu. Some, like “Un Rêve,” his first published poem, and “Une Vision,” another early work, deal with the fantastic; others (e.g., “Charles-Quint,” “Jeanne d'Arc,” “Napoléon”) with the historical. They offer a wide variety of moods, from the very grave (“Sur la Naissance du Conte de Paris”) to the light and humorous (“Le Songe du Reviewer”). The theological seriousness of the long poem “L'Espoir en Dieu” was immediately followed by the brief and frivolous “A la...
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