SOURCE: Bishop, Lloyd. “Musset's ‘Souvenir’ and the Greater Romantic Lyric.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 12, no. 4 (summer 1984): 119-30.

In the following essay, Bishop maintains that Musset's poem “Souvenir” fits the structural, thematic, and narrative mode of the “greater Romantic lyric” as defined by Meyer Abrams and exemplified in poetic works by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Victor Hugo, and others.

The earliest formal invention produced by Romantic poets is a genre that Meyer Abrams has called the “greater Romantic lyric,” a genre that evolved out of eighteenth-century loco-descriptive poetry and that includes such well known poems as Coleridge's “The Eolian Harp” and “Fears in Solitude,” Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” Shelley's “Stanzas Written in Dejection,” Keat's “Ode to a Nightingale” and Schiller's “Der Spaziergang.”¹ It is only recently that the genre has been shown to include French poems as well, specifically “Tristesse d'Olympio” and “Le Lac.”² That “Souvenir” is very similar thematically to...