Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
Critical opinion:
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“The most important poet in the history of French
letters” (Paul Valéry, 1924)
“Baudelaire’s 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
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)
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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
PASCAL On Boredom
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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
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
“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
“Poéte maudit” (cursed poet)
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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)
Édouard Manet, Baudelaire’s Mistress,
Jeanne Duval
Baudelaire’s grave at Montparnasse
Correspondences
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let escape sometimes confused words;
Man traverses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.
Like long echoes that intermingle from afar [se confondent]
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast like the night and like the light,
The perfumes, the colors and the sounds respond. [se répondent]
There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies,
—And others corrupted, rich and triumphant
That have the expanse of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind [l’esprit] and senses.
Arcade
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)
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
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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;
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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;
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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;
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That is the black picture that in a dream one night
I saw unfold before my penetrating eyes.
I saw myself at the back of that quiet den,
Leaning on my elbows, cold, silent, envying,
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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!
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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)
Twilight
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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.
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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;
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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.
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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.
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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)
Spleen I
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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.
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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.
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The great bell whines, the smoking log
Accompanies in falsetto the snuffling clock,
While in a deck of cards reeking of filthy scents,
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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)
Spleen II
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I have more memories than if I'd lived a thousand years.
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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.
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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)
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.
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