“Kobiety, wiem to, pisać nie powinny / A jednak piszę…”. Romantyczna poetka i jej muza
“Women – I Know – Should Not Write // Yet I Do Write…” A Romantic Poetess and Her Muse

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses selected lyrics by French romantic poetess Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in which poetry and femininity clash against each other as mutually opposing and exclusive values which all the same do coexist. In spite of a clear depreciation of her own artistic work, exposing its weaknesses and partiality, Desbordes-Valmore is not shown as a mimicry author but rather, one who establishes a different – and positive – dissimilarity of female writing. It is an emotional, simple and naïve poetry but one that has been purposefully selected owing to the genuineness quality ascribed to it. Investigation into the issue of female self-thematism in romanticism is supported by tracing of rhetorical evocations of Muse in the Elegies. In the rivalry between love and the Muse, as depicted in her poems, the former apparently prevails. Poetry essentially makes passion its subject, writing becomes an opportunity for overpowering love frenzy, transgressing by the poetess-subject of herself as a loving woman – for an identification-related transgression.

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