The poetic return of Theophile Gautier

Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) was once a very big name in world literature. He's credited with having coined the battle cry "Art For Art's Sake." So it's entirely fitting that this new translation of his verse— the first in a half-century— is entitled not Selected Poems, but rather Selected Lyrics.

There is something craftsman-like about the term. Lyrics, after all, are supposed to accompany music. They're utilitarian. Gautier started his career as a passionate partisan of the Romantic Movement— so much so that when Agnes Lee translated a generous selection of his poetry for a limited edition in the 1920s, she had no problem including such early ultra-Romantic fare as Albertus, or The Sin and the Peach side-by-side with pieces from Gautier's magisterial collection, Emaux et Camees (Enamels and Cameos).

But by the 1960s, when Brian Hill translated a slender selection of Gautier's verse as The Gentle Enchanter, it had already been decided that it was Gautier the Skilled Craftsman— not Gautier the Wildly Imaginative Young Romantic— who needed to be saved.

Who remembers Hugo's poems?

This is not a completely unjust judgment. Many wildly romantic young Frenchmen tripped over each other while attempting to outdo the masters of the school, Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset.

(And even in their cases, I suppose one could ask, "Who now reads Rolla?" Certainly many more people know Hugo as the author of Les Misérables than as the author of Han of Iceland or Bug-Jargal— although the two earlier works are far more entertaining.)

Gautier didn't necessarily disgrace himself in the process, but aside from his novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, he didn't necessarily cover himself with glory.

Always the imitators

Enamels and Cameos, on the other hand, is an immensely influential work. It stands beside Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil as one of the twin colossi of mid-19th-Century French poetry— each of which inspired its own school of imitators. Just as Baudelaire became the spiritual father of Symbolism, so Gautier pointed the way to Parnassianism— the school that pre-dated Symbolism and to which the future Symbolist masters Verlaine and Mallarme were originally allied.

So what makes Gautier's book of poems, which Shapiro has translated in full, that important?

A cooler Romanticism

In place of the overheated rhetorical and out-of-control Romanticism, Gautier substituted a cooler technique. To Gautier, it wasn't what you said, but how you said it that really mattered. He likened himself not to some Werther agonizing in a garret but to a craftsman carving gems at his workbench.

This was a tremendously appealing sentiment to young would-be poets who didn't want to look foolish. Not that the Parnassians were a totally sober-sided lot. Gautier retained from his Romantic days a sense of the exotic and the mysterious, and the poets who followed in his footsteps—like Heredia, and Leconte de Lisle— tended to emulate him.

A rose on a woman's breast

On one hand, Gautier could write a Symphony in White Major. (And didn't the notion of naming poems and even paintings after musical compositions take on a life of its own in the late 19th Century?) But then he could write a Spectre of the Rose, told from the point of view of a wilting flower recollecting its place of honor on the breast of a beautiful woman at a ball, and itself later made the subject of a famed ballet.

Precision and Fancy were the twin poles of Gautier's poetic universe. Gautier never had much of a following among English-speaking poets, but through Ruben Dario his work helped to shape and color Modernismo— the Latin equivalent of a shotgun marriage between Parnassianism and Symbolism.

I've thrown lots of names around here like an especially boring professor, but let me say that the best reason in the world for English-speakers to welcome Gautier's return is that he's so damned entertaining as a poet. The collection has nary a brain-twister in the bunch, just 500-plus pages of pure pleasure. The price is a bit steep, and I certainly hope Yale will issue a paperback version of Shapiro's translation. When times get hard, we need a little "gentle enchantment" in our lives.