SOURCE: "Gérard de Nerval," in The Emory University Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Spring, 1965, pp. 15-31.

Strauss is a German-born American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he summarizes Nerval's philosophical orientation and discusses Les Chimères, focusing on the poems "El Desdichado" and "Artemis."

Between the years 1798 and 1800 a group of German poets and critics launched a journal known as the Athenäum, which became the first platform of the conti nental Romantic movement. The leading critic of the group, Friedrich Schlegel, declared, "Only he who has a religion of his own, an original view of the Infinite, can be an artist"; and the leading poet of the group, Novalis, proclaimed, "Poetry is that which is genuinely and absolutely real. This is the core of my philosophy: the more poetic, the truer."

These new assertions about the nature of art and poetry are indices of a...