SOURCE: "The Prefatory Poetics of Théophile Gautier," in Romance Notes, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Fall, 1991, pp. 47-54.

In the following essay, Lien examines the role of the prefatory poem in reconciling Gautier's aesthetic of emotional detachment with an impulse toward sentiment in La comédie de la mort, Espñna, and Emaux et camees.

Although his position as precursor of the Parnassian movement remains undisputed, readers and critics alike tend to relegate Gautier the poet to the status of reformed Romantic whose Emaux et camées illustrate his doctríne of 'Tart pour l'art." His earlier poetry and the development of his personal poetics remain shrouded in the anthology formula of descriptive poet with a limited emotional range. As is so often the case in the nineteenth century, these "idées reçues" are the by-product of the author's own prefatory discourse, most notably the preface to Albertus...