Tag Théophile Gautier

Racine and other familiar names

Another excerpt from Charles Rosen’s 1997 NYRB article on La Fontaine and French prosody: Most American and English students have a hard time understanding why Alfred de Musset literally fainted with ecstasy at the Comédie Française when he heard the…

That bitter abyss

About a month ago I noticed that the opening two lines of T. S. Eliot’s Grishkin poem from Whispers of Immortality (1920) mimic the respective lines of Théophile Gautier’s Carmen (1852). Compare Eliot’s half-stanza Grishkin is nice: her Russian eyeIs…