L’Absinthe (1875-1876), oil on canvas by Edgar Degas, in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Wikipedia). George Moore discussed it in Modern Painting (1893) and elsewhere, disabusing art critics of the moral turpitude they perceived in the picture (which is more palpable in La Ballade de l’Amant de Coeur). The painting and poem instead epitomized bohemian virtues of the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes.
George Moore signed this poem Pagan, his alias around 1880 when he wrote Pagan Poems (1881). Burgess was the alias of his brother Augustus Moore, with whom he lived in London at the time; Pot was the dramatic writer Henry Pottinger Stephens (1851-1903).
George’s bibliographer classified this publication as a leaflet and speculatively dated it 1886, but the actual date may be earlier. The only extant copy, from which this transcription was made, is in the Cornell University Library.
A revised version of the poem was included in section XI of the fourth American edition of Confessions of a Young Man (Gilcher A12-d) as “La Ballade d’Alfred, Alfred aux Belles Dents.”
La Ballade de l’Amant de Coeur (AI)
La Ballade de l’Amant de Coeur (AI) is a PDF of the poem that may be uploaded to AI applications such as Notebook LM for guided analysis and interpretation.
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