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 (1832) in which Gautier distances himself from both the emotional grandiloquence of the early Romantics and the socio-political concerns that pervaded the literary circles during the 1830s. Indeed, Gautier must have seemed a curious figure with his call for artistic expression the utility of which resided in its beauty alone.

One must remember, however, in spite of the burgeoning stylistic virtuosity that one already finds in this collection, that Gautier possessed, as Baudelaire pointed out long ago, "cette fameuse qualité que les badauds de la critique s'obstinent à lui refuser: le sentiment." In spite of the somewhat misleading emphasis on the formal aspects of his work found in his prefaces, a complementary reading of the poems reveals that Gautier's poetry combines affective impulses with a well-crafted form in order to create works of enduring art. I propose then to examine, through an exploration of his prefatory poems, Gautier's struggle to reconcile these two traditional facets of poetry.

In order to prepare readers for his treatment of death in the long title poem of his next "recueil," La Comédie de la Mort (1838), Gautier makes use of a prefatory poem rather than the more didactic prose preface. His prologue's very title, "Portail," immediately sets up the metaphoric equivalence between collection and monument; and like the portal of a Gothic cathedral, it not only serves as means of entry into the volume but provides a descriptive presentation of the ideas and events that inspired its construction. The poem opens with a direct address to the readers:

Ne trouve pas étrange, homme du monde, artiste,
Qui que tu sois, de voir par un portail si triste
S'ouvrir fatalement ce volume nouveau.

Hélas! tout monument qui dresse au ciel son faîte,
Enfonce autant les pieds qu'il élève la tête.

Expanding upon this concept of the necessarily dual movement of the monument, the following stanzas accumulate details contrasting that which one sees at the top of the cathedral with that which is found below. A single example will suffice as a paradigmatic illustration of the connotations associated with each:

En bas, l'oiseau de nuit, l'ombre humide des tombes;
En haut, l'or du soleil, la neige des colombes …

Only after this descriptive passage is the implied comparison between monument and poetry overtly acknowledged:

Mon œuvre est ainsi faite, et sa première assise
N'est qu'une dalle étroite et d'une teinte grise
Avec des mots sculptés que la mousse remplit.

Dieu fasse qu'en passant sur cette pauvre pierre,
Les pieds des pèlerins n'effacent pas entière
Cette humble inscription et ce nom qu'on y lit.

These stanzas substantiate the reader's intuition that for Gautier the poem can, by the sculpted quality of the verses with which the poet creates his work, attain the durability of architecture. This explanation, however, hardly seems to justify such a development of the dual nature of the monument, whether poetry or cathedral; and a perusal of the rest of the work indicates that Gautier is not simply indulging in superfluous pictorial detail here. The "clef de voûte" of his poetic construction, clearly indicated by the titles of the two main sections of the poem, "La Vie dans la Mort" and "La Mort dans la Vie," is the constant interpenetration of life and death. The poem's emphasis on the necessarily connected nature of these two spaces then subtly foreshadows the work's thematic development.

On another level, the juxtaposition of these two spaces, which one could define as the exposed outer surface of the monument and its hidden inner space, also serves to underscore the figurative nature of poetry as a metaphor of the work's metaphors. Gautier's remark on the exterior reality of his "cathedral" shows his awareness that readers' perceptions of his work will vary: "C'est tout ce que l'on veut selon ce qu'on y voit." This same comment, implies that there may well be more than meets the eye in Gautier's poetry: the metaphor's "vehicle" points to another referent, implicit and unseen by the inattentive reader, its "tenor." The accumulation of descriptive details in Gautier's poetry then serves as a means of objectifying his psychical reactions to certain situations. In "La Comédie de la Mort," hidden beneath the exterior beauty of the sculpted words, one inevitably finds the rotting corpse that provoked the artistic response:

Toujours vous trouveriez, sous cette architecture,
Au milieu de la fange et de la pourriture,
Dans le suaire usé le cadavre tout droit

If such a reminder of the polysemantic nature of poetry is hardly needed here for the reader to become aware that this entire work has "le teint pâle des morts," it nonetheless serves to underscore the inevitably dual nature of Gautier's entire œuvre, whose descriptive facade has often led critics to ignore its human, and even emotional, qualities. Might one not view the following verses as applicable to the majority of his work?

Mes vers sont les tombeaux tout brodés de sculptures;
Ils cachent un cadavre, et sous leurs fioritures
Ils pleurent bien souvent en paraissant chanter.

Chacun est le cercueil d'une illusion morte;
J'enterre là les corps que la houle m'apporte
Quand un de mes vaisseaux a sombré dans la mer;

Beaux rêves avortés, ambitions déçues,
Souterraines ardeurs, passions sans issues,
Tout ce que l'existence a d'intime et d'amer.

Gautier's next collection, España (1845), which one critic has termed "l'adieu aux thèmes romantiques et le salut timide au Parnasse," also begins with an aptly titled opening poem: "Départ." This poem creates an image of the poet that comes to light as the reader is presented witha prefatory explanation of the reasons behind the voyage, i.e., the text, that the poet has undertaken. The poem begins with the poet's rationalisation of his voyage:

Avant d'abandonner à tout jamais ce globe,
…. .
J'ai voulu visiter les cités et les hommes
Et connaître l'aspect de ce monde où nous sommes.

Immediately afterwards, however, he indicates another reason for his departure that is perhaps more revealing of the poet's veritable attitude: "J'étouffais à l'étroit dans ce vaste Paris." Indeed, the poet seems tortured by an almost Baudelairian ennui.

The readers must then reconcile this posited identity of the poet with their perception of the apparently objective transcription of reality found in so much of this work. This is quite easily done since the purely representational value of the numerous references to the countryside, customs, art and people of Spain is constantly undermined by the fact that each is "visualised through the deforming prism" [P. E. Tenant, Théophile Gautier] of the poet's overriding personality. The preceding discussion of the poem "Portail" indicated what Riffaterre's exemplary reading of one of this collection's poems, "In Deserto," forcefully confirms: "However verifiable the text's mimetic accuracy … it also consistently distorts the facts or at least shows a bias in favor of details able to converge metonymically on a single concept." By identifying the poetic persona whose vision informs the entire work, Gautier's prefatory poem pushes the reader toward an interpretation that goes beyond the mere "meaning" of the referential detail in favor of a more global understanding of the various poems' "significance."

The voyage upon which we embark is at once a geographical displacement and an itinerant exploration of the poet's psyche as seen in the attendant themes of death, violence, love, forgetfulness and the passing of time. The poet's imagination then transforms his description of the voyage in such a way that the presented exterior world materializes his various states of mind; yet these attitudes must in turn be transformed to fit into the poem's thematic and structural framework. Reality, be it exterior or interior, necessarily undergoes transfiguration in the process of poetic creation:

Poète, tu sais bien que la réalité
A besoin, pour couvrir sa triste nudité,
Du manteau que lui file à son rouet d'ivoire
L'imagination, menteuse qu'il faut croire.

Up to this point, Gautier endowed his prefatory poems with titles implicitly marking their status as prologue, subtly transforming them into a "mode d'emploi" of the text that follows. With Emaux et camées, the very title of the opening poem forces the reader to consider its value as preface. Not paratext, but simply text that one must read at once as both poem and preface, this poem subverts the reader's conventional generic expectations in order to force a close reading of it. At first glance, "Préface" simply informs readers of the circumstance under which the collection was composed:

The two quatrains present an image of Goethe, removed from the fracas of wartime events and devoting his energy to artistic creation. This image serves, of course, as point of comparison for the poet's own attitude: the metaphoric "vitres fermées" convey his refusal to participate in the raucus antics of recent political events, "l'ouragan." Complementary to this apolitical stance, the poem develops the theme of the artist's dedication to his art: with its obligatory formal constraints, the use of a sonnet here reflects the necessity of technical proficiency on the part of the poet.

Gautier ends his poem by reiterating the collection's title in order to underscore its importance. Moving from monument to miniature, the title's reference to these two "arts mineurs" suggests the restriction of subject. One finds few themes that require extensive philosophical or emotional development, and the concision of the octosyllabic line reinforces this tendency. The definitions of these art forms indicate that their value resides above all in their delicately crafted form: Littré defines a "camée" as a "pierre ou coquille qui, composée de différentes couches, est sculptée en relief," and "émaux" as "décorations de peintures appliquées sur métal." Gautier's identification of the poet as craftsman, which receives a more overt treatment in the closing poem, "L'Art," is thus immediately implied. Metaphorically, these definitions point to the poet's intricate use of language, and so to the reader's task of deciphering the text. If cameos are composed of "différentes couches," the enameling process consists of mixing metal oxides with the enamel in order to "colorer le fondant [l'émail], tout en lui laissant sa translucidité." Both make use of a technique that produces a multi-layered work of art, just as poetry's inherently figurative nature leads to the textual density created by the poet's combinations of tropes that transform description into significance, and which the reader can only discover by becoming aware of the poem's multiple levels of articulation.

The following poem, "Affinités secrètes," which by its position informs the rest of the collection, expands upon this idea of transformation. One could even view this poem as the work's prologue, and indeed, it carries the same thematic thrust as Gautier's earlier prologues: the inevitable interdependence between various aspects of reality in his works. The poem seems at first a typically Romantic reflection on the transitory nature of things; this dissolution, however, leads to revival, for the various objects are soon reincarnated in other forms. The poet's seemingly wistful attitude thus gives way to the insight that:

Par de lentes métamorphoses,
Les marbres blancs en blanches chairs,
Les fleurs roses en lèvres roses
Se refont dans les corps divers.

Such metamorphoses are, of course, the product of the poet's imagination, and the analogies found between seemingly exclusive realities form the basis of Gautier's poetic creation. For example, references to both plastic and literary works of art abound here as points of reference, but transformed by the poet's creative process; thus, we find the image of woman idealized into a series of sculptural poses in "Le Poëme de la femme." As the preceding prologues already made clear, such metamorphoses are not limited to external reality, artistic or otherwise, and in "Le Château du souvenir," the poet transforms his own memories into a veritable museum.

The restricted universe of the poet posited in the preface can then be defined as the textual space in which the integration of objective reality and subjective emotion takes place. As Benesch correctly argues, it is from this "confrontation de son monde intérieur avec le monde extérieur que va naître son œuvre." Like dreams, which acquire their disturbing quality by combining psychic impulses with events and objects from the external world, Gautier's poetry creates an ambiguous atmosphere that may be either haunting or whimsical. Indeed, the reader can perhaps best define Gautier's poetry by its "hermaphroditic" mix of external and internal realities that is complemented by the analogous "bizarre mélange" ("Contralto") of passion and impassibility found in Gautier's poetic persona.

It then remains for the poet to indicate the manner in which this combinatory creation can itself take on life. This of course is the subject of the well-known poem, "L'Art," which Gautier insisted close the collection "dont elle résume la pensée," and which one might well consider the collection's postface. The only means by which the poet's dreams may take on a certain reality can be by fitting them into an appropriate form; a form that, through the poet's solid craftsmanship, may turn the poem into a thing of beauty. The final stanza's well-known enjoinder to sculpt, file, or chisel away in order to attain that synthesis of dream and reality, which for Gautier constitutes poetry, may then be seen as the conclusion to his incessant quest—the stages of which are marked by the prefatory poems that accompany his works—for poetic purity: