Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

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Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
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Critical opinion

• The most important poet in the history of French
  letters (Paul Valéry, 1924)
• Baudelaires position is central to the whole of
  modern European literature (Paul de Man, 1967)
• The writer of modern life (Walter Benjamin)
• Marked a radical departure from poetry before
  him, inaugurating Symbolism, and influencing
  Surrealism, and Postmodernism

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Symbolism

• impressionistic, contemplative preoccupation
  with powerful symbols and their effects on
  consciousness
• Dominance of synaesthesia the tendency for one
  sensory experience (e.g. color) to evoke another
  (e.g. sound)

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Les Fleurs du mal (1857/1861)

• Poet as an urban wanderer (flâneur)
• The urban experience
• Modern life as a shock to the senses
• rejection of bourgeois values
• marginalized characters
• Problematizes language
• Spleen, ennui

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PASCAL On Boredom

• Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a
  state of complete rest, without passions, without
  occupation, without diversion, without effort.
• Then he faces his nullity, loneliness,
  inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
• And at once there wells up from the depths of his
  soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin,
  resentment, despair. Pensées 622

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Other works

• Spleen de Paris (1869) inaugurates prose poem
• Important commentaries on contemporary art
  (Salons)
• Translations of Edgar Allen Poe

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The modern city
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• Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions
  which the big-city crowd aroused in those who
  first observed it.. The inhabitant of the
  great urban centers, writes Valéry, reverts to
  a state of savagery that is, of isolation. The
  feeling of being dependent on others is
  gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of
  the social mechanism. Any improvement of this
  mechanism eliminates certain modes of behavior
  and emotions. Comfort isolates on the other
  hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to
  mechanization. In the mid-nineteenth century, the
  invention of the match brought forth a number of
  innovations which have one thing in common a
  single abrupt movement of the hand triggers a
  process of many steps . With regard to
  countless movements of switching, inserting,
  pressing, and the like, the snapping of the
  photographer had the greatest consequences.
  Henceforth a touch of the finger sufficed to fix
  an event for an unlimited period of time.
  Haptic experiences of this kind were joined by
  optic ones, such as are supplied by advertising
  pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big
  city. Moving through this traffic involves the
  individual in a series of shocks and collisions.
  At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow
  through him in rapid succession, like the energy
  from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who
  plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of
  electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of
  the shock, he calls this man a kaleidoscope
  endowed with consciousness.
• Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life,
  190-191

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Poéte maudit (cursed poet)

• Life of debts, emotional torments, erratic
  productivity, and illness
• Experienced social exclusion and persecution (six
  poems in Les Fleurs du mal were banned for
  obscenity)

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Édouard Manet, Baudelaires Mistress, Jeanne Duval
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Baudelaires grave at Montparnasse
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Correspondences Nature is a temple where living
pillarsLet escape sometimes confused wordsMan
traverses it through forests of symbolsThat
observe him with familiar glances.Like long
echoes that intermingle from afar se
confondentIn a dark and profound unity,Vast
like the night and like the light,The perfumes,
the colors and the sounds respond. se
répondentThere are perfumes fresh like the
skin of infantsSweet like oboes, green like
prairies,And others corrupted, rich and
triumphantThat have the expanse of infinite
things,Like ambergris, musk, balsam and
incense,Which sing the ecstasies of the mind
lesprit and senses.
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Arcade
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To a Passer-By The street about me roared with a
deafening sound. Tall, slender, in heavy
mourning, majestic grief, A woman passed, with a
glittering hand Raising, swinging the hem and
flounces of her skirt Agile and graceful, her
leg was like a statue's. Tense as in a delirium
un extravagant, I drank From her eyes, pale
sky where tempests germinate, The sweetness that
enthralls and the pleasure that kills. A
lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn, Will I
see you no more before eternity? Elsewhere, far,
far from here! too late! never perhaps!For I
know not where you fled, you know not where I
go,O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew
it! William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil
(Fresno, CA Academy Library Guild, 1954)
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In groups, discuss

• What images of the city are inscribed? Choose one
  or two that you find particularly striking.
• What impression does the reader get?
• What is the position/role/characterization of the
  poet?
• What is Baudelaire saying about modern life?

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Gambling

• In faded armchairs aged courtesans, Pale,
  eyebrows penciled, with alluring fatal eyes,
  Smirking and sending forth from wizened ears A
  jingling sound of metal and of gems
• Around the gaming tables faces without lips,
  Lips without color and jaws without teeth,
  Fingers convulsed with a hellborn fever
  Searching empty pockets and fluttering bosoms
• Under dirty ceilings a row of bright lusters And
  enormous oil-lamps casting their rays On the
  tenebrous brows of distinguished poets Who come
  there to squander the blood they have sweated
• That is the black picture that in a dream one
  nightI saw unfold before my penetrating eyes.I
  saw myself at the back of that quiet den,Leaning
  on my elbows, cold, silent, envying,
• Envying the stubborn passion of those people,
  The dismal merriment of those old prostitutes,
  All blithely selling right before my eyes, One
  his ancient honor, another her beauty!
• My heart took fright at its envy of so many
  Wretches running fiercely to the yawning chasm,
  Who, drunk with their own blood, would prefer,
  in a word, Suffering to death and hell to
  nothingness!
• William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno,
  CA Academy Library Guild, 1954)

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Twilight

• Behold the sweet evening, friend of the criminal
  It comes like an accomplice, stealthily the sky
  Closes slowly like an immense alcove, And
  impatient man turns into a beast of prey. O
  evening, kind evening, desired by him Whose arms
  can say, without lying "Today We labored!" It
  is the evening that comforts Those minds that
  are consumed by a savage sorrow, The obstinate
  scholar whose head bends with fatigue And the
  bowed laborer who returns to his bed.
• Meanwhile in the atmosphere malefic demons
  Awaken sluggishly, like businessmen, And take
  flight, bumping against porch roofs and shutters.
  Among the gas flames worried by the wind
  Prostitution catches alight in the streets
  Like an ant-hill she lets her workers out
  Everywhere she blazes a secret path, Like an
  enemy who plans a surprise attack She moves in
  the heart of the city of mire Like a worm that
  steals from Man what he eats. Here and there one
  hears food sizzle in the kitchens, The theaters
  yell, the orchestras moan
• The gambling dens, where games of chance delight,
  Fill up with whores and cardsharps, their
  accomplices The burglars, who know neither
  respite nor mercy, Are soon going to begin their
  work, they also, And quietly force open
  cash-boxes and doors To enjoy life awhile and
  dress their mistresses.
• Meditate, O my soul, in this solemn moment, And
  close your ears to this uproar It is now that
  the pains of the sick grow sharper! Somber Night
  grabs them by the throat they reach the end Of
  their destinies and go to the common pit The
  hospitals are filled with their sighs. More
  than one Will come no more to get his fragrant
  soup By the fireside, in the evening, with a
  loved one.
• However, most of them have never known The
  sweetness of a home, have never lived!
• William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno,
  CA Academy Library Guild, 1954)

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Spleen I

• January, irritated with the whole city, Pours
  from his urn great waves of gloomy cold On the
  pale occupants of the nearby graveyard And death
  upon the foggy slums.
• My cat seeking a bed on the tiled floor Shakes
  his thin, mangy body ceaselessly The soul of an
  old poet wanders in the rain-pipe With the sad
  voice of a shivering ghost.
• The great bell whines, the smoking
  logAccompanies in falsetto the snuffling
  clock,While in a deck of cards reeking of filthy
  scents,
• My mortal heritage from some dropsical old woman,
  The handsome knave of hearts and the queen of
  spades Converse sinisterly of their dead love
  affair.
• William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno,
  CA Academy Library Guild, 1954)

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Spleen II

• I have more memories than if I'd lived a thousand
  years.
• A heavy chest of drawers cluttered with
  balance-sheets, Processes, love-letters, verses,
  ballads, And heavy locks of hair enveloped in
  receipts, Hides fewer secrets than my gloomy
  brain. It is a pyramid, a vast burial vault
  Which contains more corpses than potter's
  field. I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon,
  In which long worms crawl like remorse And
  constantly harass my dearest dead. I am an old
  boudoir full of withered roses, Where lies a
  whole litter of old-fashioned dresses, Where the
  plaintive pastels and the pale Bouchers, Alone,
  breathe in the fragrance from an opened phial.
• Nothing is so long as those limping days, When
  under the heavy flakes of snowy years Ennui, the
  fruit of dismal apathy, Becomes as large as
  immortality. Henceforth you are no more, O
  living matter! Than a block of granite
  surrounded by vague terrors, Dozing in the
  depths of a hazy Sahara An old sphinx ignored by
  a heedless world, Omitted from the map, whose
  savage nature Sings only in the rays of a
  setting sun.
• William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno,
  CA Academy Library Guild, 1954)

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Quotes taken from

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
• Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life.
  Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, Mass.
  Harvard UP, 2006.