Les Chimères Reading Order

Les Chimères (1854) by Gérard de Nerval is a sequence of twelve sonnets appended to the collection Les Filles du feu and constituting the most sustained and most discussed body of poetry in the French tradition between Lamartine and Baudelaire. The sonnets are hallucinatory, allusive, and deliberately obscure: Nerval drew on Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Orphic mythology, Christian mysticism, Egyptian religion, and German Romanticism to create a symbolic universe in which the lost ideal woman (Aurélie, Adrienne, the goddess, the ideal) appears and disappears in a series of transformations that simultaneously personal and cosmic. The most famous of the sonnets, 'El Desdichado' ('The Disinherited'), opens with the line 'Je suis le ténébreux, — le veuf, — l'inconsolé' ('I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled') and proceeds through a series of mythological identifications (Orpheus, Biron, Phoebus) that both are and are not Nerval. Les Chimères are among the most influential poems in the French tradition: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud all acknowledged their importance; André Breton placed Nerval at the origin of the Surrealist movement; and Jenny (the last and longest of the Chimères) anticipates the formal ambitions of Symbolism by thirty years.