Full Text:COPYRIGHT 1995 St. James Press, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage
Poet, critic, translator, Charles Baudelaire, though largely ignored in his own
time, is today considered one of the literary giants of the 19th century. His
translations of five volumes of Edgar Allan Poe's tales, in addition to his three
essays on the American writer, are mainly responsible for Poe's fame in
France and throughout Europe. His essays on art and literature and his article
on Wagner make him one of the greatest critics of the 19th century. And
finally his volume of verse Les Fleurs du mal (TheFlowers of Evil) and
his Petits Poèmes en prose (Little Poems in Prose) have earned him the
title of our first modern poet as well as one of the finest of city poets.
Baudelaire is often called `the father of modern criticism' and `the first
aesthetician of his age', not so much because of his value judgements of
individual artists and writers as because of the ideas and principles he
articulated. If his essays on art are usually considered superior to those on
literature, it is mainly because demands of publishers often made it necessary
for him to discuss a number of minor writers, while laws of censorship forced
him to resort to irony, parody, and pastiche in order to express unpopular
opinions.
Except during the Revolutionary period, when for a short time he adopted a
more utilitarian conception of art, Baudelaire, like Flaubert, believed that the
goal of art was beauty—beauty which, when `purified by art', could be derived
from even ugliness,evil, and horror. That is why, in an unfinished epilogue
intended for the second edition of The Flowers of Evil, he could say to the
city of Paris: `You have given me your mud and I have turned it into gold.'
Baudelaire's personal conception of beauty, as noted in his Journaux
intimes(Intimate Journals), was much like that of Poe. Though he was
obviously influenced by the American writer, even to the point of extensively
plagiarizing him in his three Poe essays, recent investigation has proved that
what he found in Poe's literary doctrine was a confirmation of his own poetic
practice as well as an affirmation of aesthetic principles he had already
espoused.
Like Poe, Baudelaire prefers a beauty tinged with melancholy, regret, and
sadness. Like Poe also, he insists on the importance of the bizarre or
strange—`an artless, unpremeditated, unconscious strangeness', as he wrote
in his Exposition universelle.In his 1857 essay on Poe, he even agrees that
`the principle of poetry is ... human aspiration toward a superior beauty'—a
definition less characteristic of his poetry than his observation that `every lyric
poet by virtue of his nature inevitably effects a return to the lost Eden'. In his
verse, Baudelaire himself often made that return, whether to the Eden of his
childhood or to that of tropical seas and skies and of happiness he had known
with his dark-skinned mistress.
With Delacroix, whose art he never ceased to glorify and whose opinions he
frequently cited, Baudelaire believed that every age and every nation
possesses its own particular beauty. In addition to its eternal or absolute
element, all beauty, he maintained, must necessarily contain this particular or
transitory element which, for him, was really synonymous with modernity. It
was his emphasis on modernity—his call for `the heroism of modern life' and
his belief that Parisian life was `rich in poetic and marvellous subjects'—that
did much to change the course of both literature and painting and is often
reflected in his own best verse.
Baudelaire was violently opposed to the servile imitation of nature as
practised by the Realists. For him, as for Delacroix, nature was a dictionary
whose hieroglyphics he sought to interpret. Imagination, the `queen of all
faculties', alone permits the poet to discover in the vast storehouse of nature
the symbols, analogies, and correspondences that can transform reality into
the poet's own vision of reality.
Baudelaire's chief claim to fame is his volume of verse The Flowers of Evil in
which can be seen a strange amalgam of old and new. Classic in its clarity,
discipline, and reliance on traditional forms, Romantic in its subjectivity, its
spirit of revolt, and its macabre elements, The Flowers of Evil is also
considered a distant forerunner of Surrealism in its use of dreams, myths, and
fantasies. Far more important, however, is the fact that, by its use of
suggestion as opposed to description and narration, it anticipates Symbolism
and opens the door to modern poetry.
The unifying theme running throughout the six sections
of The Flowers of Evil is that of the human condition, of the conflict between
good and evil, spleen and ideal, dream and reality. Obsessed with a belief in
original sin and in the duality of man and using his own personal experiences
as raw material, Baudelaire examined the spiritual problems of his age with a
probing, almost brutal self-analysis. Unlike the Romantics, however, he saw
himself not as unique but closely akin to the reader, whom he addresses in
his introductory poem as `hypocritical reader, my counter-part, my brother'.
One of Baudelaire's most important innovations is his use of
correspondences. Although in his essays he speaks of the transcendental
correspondences between the visible and invisible worlds, it is the synesthetic
correspondences between colours, sounds, and perfumes that he employs in
both his poetry and prose. Even more characteristic is his use of the
correspondences between exterior nature and his own inner world. By finding
symbols in outer reality that correspond to and suggest his inner thoughts and
feelings, he often succeeds in creating what he himself called `a suggestive
magic ... containing the world exterior to the artist and the artist himself'—a
suggestive magic leaving a `lacuna' to be filled by the reader. Such use of the
symbol not only allowed him to exteriorize his idea or mood, by giving
concrete form to the abstract, but also helped him achieve what he termed an
`indispensable obscurity' that stops short of being hermetic.
Almost as important as his use of suggestion is Baudelaire's use of the
cityscape to replace the nature description of the Romantics. Although the city
is never described, its sounds are heard almost everywhere, and its presence
everywhere felt. Both TheFlowers of Evil and the Little Poems in Prose are
permeated with the omnipresence of the city, if only through choice of imagery
or through implication.
In style, Baudelaire introduced a number of innovations that have since been
adopted by most modern poets. As a result of his emphasis on suggestion,
the image, no longer merely peripheral, often becomes the very essence of
the poem. His tendency to introduce a prosaic or even crude image in the
midst of an otherwise highly poetic style as well as his remarkable ability to
treat sordid reality without losing poetic elevation have been widely imitated.
Equally characteristic are his musical sonorities, his subtle and suggestive
rhythms, his frequent use of monologue or dialogue to achieve dramatic
effect, and his mingling of the grand manner with a quiet, subdued, and
conversational tone.