SOURCE: "Alfred de Vigny and the Poetic Experience: From Alienation to Renascence," in Romantic Review, Vol. LXVI, No. 1, 1976, pp. 268-89.

In the following essay, Majewski describes the transformation of Vigny's conception of the poet in society: from the portrait of the poet as a scapegoat and a victim in Stello to the poet as spiritual leader in "La Maison du Berger."

C. S. Lewis, Jung and others have analyzed the movement of the romantic consciousness in the experience of poetry as a desire to create through harmonious, symbolic language the image of a world which would be whole; that is coherent, ordered and beautiful. The essential rhythm of the poet's quest for wholeness can thus be seen in terms of the archetypal pattern of rebirth; the poems themselves manifest in their themes and structure a sense of evolution and spiritual discovery such as that of the Ancient Mariner...