Enamels and Cameos and Other Poems

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (1811 - 1872) was a French writer and critic. In his youth Gautier was an adherent of Romanticism, but later his work became difficult to classify and he remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He rejected bourgeois everyday life saying that it is a kingdom of vulgar men and hucksters. He despised petit bourgeois moralizing and democratic ideological content in literature. This book of poems - Enamels and Cameos - is his last and some consider his most important work. It focusses on the beauty of everyday life, his poetry becoming compact and Gautier's poetry changes profoundly, becoming compact and stark, as Gautier explained, "treating tiny subjects in a severely formal way." He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Proust and Oscar Wilde.