Théophile Gautier: the useless book and the excellence of the poet

Abstract

This article investigates the conceptions that guide the poetic work of Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). In the preface to the book Albertus ou L’ame et le péché (1833), the nineteenth-century French poet defends the poetry of evasion. In these terms, poetry is thought of as the art of verse endowed with freedom to compose rare artworks, useless excellencies carefully chiseled for the delight of a reader with an artistic soul. Like the hippogriff, the poet, according to Gautier, must have mastery over grammatical, rhetorical, and poetic knowledge, must dedicate himself to disciplined word work, in the exercise of idleness, and must, above all, be endowed with d’esprit, that is, the penchant for composing verses that distance poetry from the word submitted to market values.