SOURCE: A preface and "The Seer in French Romanticism," in The Orphic Vision: Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud, University of Nebraska Press, 1964, pp. vii-ix, 68-128.

Bays is an American educator and critic specializing in French literature. In the following excerpt, she asserts that Nerval attempted to unify myth, the occult, and religion in Les Chimères.

In the literature of Romanticism the theme of the poet as seer is not the large and all-embracing subject it might appear to be at first glance. It is, in fact, a small branch of a much larger current of thought known as Illuminism, which was extremely rich and complex and which affected, to a greater or lesser degree, the majority of writers from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth….

The intellectual curiosity of the Romantics toward the phenomenon of voyance, it may be noted...