Oscar Wilde owed “art for art’s sake” to the now comparatively little-read poet Théophile Gautier. A Parisian, Gautier shared a muse with Baudelaire and although his poems are less dark and more delicate they are just as in thrall to the senses — another of his works was the story of Giselle. A Une Robe Rose is a striptease of a poem. As he undresses his muse with his heady descriptions, with the texture of the dress and skin fusing in a haze of pink light, it’s like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life.
It’s easy to see why Wilde was keen but that Gautier should also be, er, Alastair Campbell’s favourite is more intriguing. When Magma poetry magazine invited him to spin a line about a poem he loved, Campbell waxed lyrical about the adept effectiveness of “How I like you in that dress which undresses you so well.”
After this undeniably sexy opening, the best line has to be the final plea. Naked, Gautier says, she would not simply inspire him: “you would be the reality dreamt of by art” — something more desirable than any sculpture that could be made, or, you might infer, any poem that could be written.
My point was meant to be cynical — note the aptness of a Blairite picking a poet famed for loving medium over message. The trouble is that Gautier really is quite seductive. The closer you look, the more his love of careful forms starts to seem less an aesthete’s escape from life than an attempt to hold on to it and render it – however briefly – as solidly as that woman under the pink dress.
I really haven’t read Campbell’s own efforts as an écrivain, the collection of soft porn short stories that he wrote under the pseudonym “Riviera Gigolo”. Sadly out of print, they are even less read than Gautier.