Vigny with a scorched heart

Torn between acute “sensitivity” and a moralist’s vocation, Vigny showed his desire to only put the intellectual component of his being on display. His poetics is elaborated in the instability of this contradiction. This article questions the way in which the poet offers himself up as the pathetic figure par excellence, innervated by his passions, finding his substance and his meaning in them at the same time that he imitates coldness, self-effacement, and denial to the point of lacking a personality.