Confessions of a White Blackbird. The Aesthetic Views of Alfred de Musset and His Poetics

The article reconstructs the aesthetics of Alfred de Musset, a thinker and artist of late romanticism, who revised the aesthetic views of the early romanticists, as well as their modern successors, and thus made a significant contribution to the self-reflection of French romanticism. He saw the prospects for the evolution of romanticism in the development not of the medieval, but of the national French classicist tradition with its clarity of style, purity of language, enriched with the sensitivity and melancholy inherent in the romantic mood. Unlike his romantic predecessors, Musset preferred tragedy over drama, reflected on the rules for constructing classical and modern tragedies, advocated the revival of the principles of the Aristotelian Poetics and the reformation of the French theatre on this basis. In the centre of his aesthetic interests were the problems of the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the comic, artistic creativity, inspiration, taste, and the relationship between art and life. The article traces the evolution of Musset’s poetics in his drama, prose, and poetry. It is concluded that the ironic distancing from the heritage of both the initiators of romanticism and its current state contrasts paradoxically with the literary work of Musset, imbued with many of the moods that he criticized as a theorist, rejecting some of the conventions of the romantic school and making a significant contribution to the renewal of the aesthetics and poetics of romanticism. In his work, he stood apart, went his own way, often against the current, trying to give the verbal expression of romantic moods purity, transparency, rigor and structure of classical French literature. Musset’s best poetry cycles are distinguished by refined symbolism and deep metaphysical reflections that give the poet’s innermost experiences a generalized philosophical meaning.