Théophile Gautier

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was born on 30 August 1811 and spent his career moving between poetry, drama, novels, journalism, and criticism. He defended Romanticism with force, but his own writing refused easy classification, becoming a reference point for Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence, and Modernism as they emerged. Writers as different as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust, and Wilde held him in high regard. He died on 23 October 1872, leaving work that belonged to no single school but fed many.