The Romantic Ballet and the Nineteenth-Century Poetic Imagination

This essay explores how nineteenth-century French poets Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire theorized dance as a poetic language and attempted to translate danced movement into written poetry. Using ballet reviews, iconography, and literary texts, I analyze the discourse surrounding two of the most famous Romantic ballets, La Sylphide and Giselle. These ballets cast the ballerina as a dancer-poet-a liminal figure who succeeded in mediating different sign systems to create embodied poetry. I examine how Baudelaire and Gautier characterized the dancer-poet as otherworldly and androgynous, and viewed her as an analog to the queer Romantic poet.