The most despairing songs are the loveliest of all,
I know immortal ones composed only of tears.

These lines are generally attributed to Alfred de Musset’s lyric poetry of the 1830s, written in the wake of intense personal and artistic turmoil. Musset’s work from this period repeatedly links creative brilliance to emotional suffering, reflecting the Romantic-era fascination with melancholy as a source of beauty. The sentiment also resonates with Musset’s public image at the time: a poet whose most celebrated verse seemed to arise from private anguish and disillusionment, and whose love-related despair (often read through the lens of his famously stormy relationship with George Sand) fed directly into his poetic voice. The couplet is typically encountered in translation and quotation anthologies rather than with full bibliographic framing.

Musset suggests that art born from profound sorrow can achieve a special beauty and endurance. “Despairing songs” are “loveliest” because they are stripped of pretense: grief forces honesty, intensity, and a kind of purity of expression. The second line heightens the claim—works “composed only of tears” can become “immortal,” implying that personal suffering, when transmuted into form, speaks across time and to others’ hidden pain. The quote reflects a Romantic-era valuation of emotion and the idea that the artist’s wounds can be a source of aesthetic power rather than merely a private misfortune.