Namouna Reading Order

Namouna (1832) by Alfred de Musset is the most dazzling and audacious of his early poems — a mock-heroic narrative poem in ottava rima (in conscious imitation of Byron's Don Juan and Beppo) that ostensibly tells the story of Hassan, a Turkish pasha who falls in love with the slave Namouna, but in practice is a sustained meditation on the impossibility of telling such a story straight. Musset interrupts the narrative constantly with digressions, ironies, parenthetical confessions of his own situation as a writer, addresses to the reader, and meta-commentary on the poem itself — all in the manner of Byron's comic epic, but with a specifically French quality of analytical self-awareness. The poem is famous in French literary history for the 'Rolla' passage in its second canto, which is a diagnosis of the French Romantic generation's spiritual condition — the same diagnosis that appears in the more famous opening of La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836), and which Musset apparently worked through in verse first. Namouna is now recognized as the most important French imitation of Beppo/Don Juan and as the work that brought the Byronic comic-ironic style into French verse.