SOURCE: "Nerval: The Poet's Uncrowning," in Love in Literature: Studies in Symbolic Expression, Indiana University Press, 1965, pp. 58-63.

Fowlie is one of the most respected and versatile critics of French literature. His works include translations of major dramatists and poets of France as well as critical studies of the major figures and movements of French letters. In the following excerpt, Fowlie speaks of the life and works of Nerval as those of a man inhabiting a dream world.

For most of the romantics, the dream world was a second domain of consciousness to which they escaped with pleasure, where they fought reason and reasoning, and where they bedecked, according to their desires, the real world. The dream for Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and de Musset was a band they put over their eyes to blot out the vulgar world of the bourgeois. For only one of the romantics was the...