THE CULT OF EVIL AND HIDDEN OPTIMISM IN BAUDELAIRE’S POETRY (original) (raw)
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUDELAIRE'S POETRY
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUDELAIRE'S POETRY, 2024
This paper explores the poetics of Charles Baudelaire, one of the key figures of French symbolism, through the analysis of his poetic actions, themes, and influences. Baudelaire, known for his vision of a modern world shrouded in dark melancholy and despair, creates a poetic universe that transcends traditional aesthetic norms and lays the foundations of symbolist aesthetics. Through the analysis of Baudelaire's verses, we discover the complex relationship between beauty and evil, as well as the deep melancholy that permeates his poetry. Baudelaire's relationship to man and his view of human nothingness and conflict with the world are also explored, and thus we mark the inseparable connection between poetry and philosophy. Through the use of symbolic language and metaphors, Baudelaire creates poetic images that express existential anxiety and the inner struggle of man with himself. In addition, we analyze the role of poets in the development of Marxist aesthetics and political thought. Through it all, his poetry is a complex, deeply introspective, and universally relevant body of art, as summarized in the book Flowers of Evil, which continues to inspire and provoke readers around the world.
KALEIDOSCOPE WORLD: The Re-location and Re-integration of the Self in Baudelairean Poetry
Unpublished
Charles Baudelaire, notable for his work, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), is perhaps “...the first truly urban poet, a poet of the built environment” (Del Nevo 509). As one of the pivotal poets of the modernist movement, he sought to break away from the traditions of poetry by seeking beauty in perversity—or seeking beauty perversely (Del Nevo 510). In particular, T.S. Eliot summarizes Baudelaire’s contribution to both literature and possibly humanity: Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important (Rainey 171). But it is insufficient to settle with the knowledge that Baudelaire was original in obsessively finding beauty in the perverse. In this essay, I provide an overview of Baudelaire as a poet through close readings of selected poems from Les Fleurs du Mal. Through this overview, I attempt to analyze Baudelaire’s poetic mind as an urban explorer (flaneur) using the psychological concepts of projective identification and synesthesia (a poetic technique that he is also well-known for), both of which highlight his unorthodox perception of reality that will serve as a major influence for succeeding poets of the Symbolist tradition.
The Uses of a Mistranslated Manifesto: Baudelaire’s ‘Genèse d’un Poème’
Esprit Créateur, 2003
Paul Valéry proposed an examination of the aspects of literature that distinguish it from other uses of language. He would investigate the "effets proprement littéraires du langage," the expressive and suggestive inventions that increase "le pouvoir et la pénétration de la parole," along with the restrictions placed upon literature "en vue de bien distinguer la langue de la fiction de celle de l'usage."1 It was a project of separation and purification. The goal was to "bien distinguer" between literary language and mere speech. Taking for granted the distinctiveness of literature, he sought to detail and to explain this difference; he claimed, for instance, that literature relied more heavily than other arts on convention and memory, and that it uniquely combined abstraction with emotion and the senses. At all times, however, literature for Valéry was something particularly mental and internal. In the "repentirs" and "ratures" of the successive drafts of a work, he saw a history of the working of the human mind.2 This paper presents one part of the story of how we arrived in the early twentieth century at a notion of literature as an exclusive mediumÂ-as an exemplary record of the creative processes of the mind, or better yet "l'esprit." If we are now sensitive to the rivalries between and within media, as well as the ways that literature can mimic and enter into dialog with the codes of meaning proper to film, sound recording or, more recently, the digital hypertext, it is only on the basis of a previously held conviction of the "uniqueness" of literature, one associated in French criticism with Valéry's poetics and with certain strands of phenomenological and semiotic analysis.1 Crucial to this history, and not only for Valéry's particular conception of the "autonomy" of literature, were the critical writings and poetic practice of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe.4 In his literaray criticism, Baudelaire presented Poe's works as a moral and metaphysical resource for an intellectual and ultimately spiritual view of poetry, as a sacred province to be protected from contamination by the mechanical materialities of the industrial age. The poetry and criticism of both Baudelaire and Poe were central influences upon Valéry's concept of the object and methods of "la poétique." However, when we look at Poe's conception of literature in his original English texts, he appears, unlike his translator, to consider literature less as an
Que J'Aime Voir ~ Eyes and Gazing in Baudelaire's 'Les Fleurs du Mal'; The Fleurs Trilogy, Volume I
Solo book, 2020
The first volume of a trilogy of literary criticism on Charles Baudelaire’s 'Les Fleurs du Mal', 'Que J’Aime Voir' provides a complete and comprehensive study of the functioning of eyes and gazes in 'Les Fleurs'. It reviews the existing bibliography on the subject, assessing the phenomenological, psychoanalytic, feminist and socio-political approaches to the gaze in Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century Paris. It goes on to reveal the 'Fleurs du Mal' city as an autoscopic topography - an optical metropolis where gazes are stacked vertically from ground-level to sky-level. Poems’ characters form an intersecting network of gazers, each making their own optical reception of their environment. Forced to peruse the self-conscious poses of models and statues around the city, the reader’s eye too is reflected back at itself from within the poems. This is the first complete study of these meta-gazes that the poems arrange reflexively inside and around themselves. It reveals the enthusiastic myopia - the voracious appetite for visual detail and obsessively close-up seeing - in the poems. This wilful, aestheticised myopia lets them reify others’ eyes as inert bijouterie studded decoratively into the texts. Other gazes avert away into stunning displays that flick between the lilliputian, gigantesque and hallucinogenic. Using concepts like scopophilia panopticism and the optical metropolis, 'Que J’Aime Voir' brings new keys that unlock the visual complexity and delights in 'Les Fleurs du Mal'.
Sophia, 2010
This paper will take up the work of Charles Baudelaire, poetic and critical, in order to present the Baudelairean aesthetic and to make a case for its relevance in our judgments about art today. Baudelaire was the first poet of the modern built environment and is known as the father of modern poetry. While his poetry is still admired, his aesthetic has been historicised: deemed to belong to that time and place in which Baudelaire wrote. This paper will argue that this historicisation by subsequent aesthetic theory and philosophy is a suppression of something integral to art and artists, without which art is liable to lose what is true about it and sink into a morass of irrelevance and triviality, or (as will be argued has partly happened) may become devoid of any value beyond the business interests that control it. In this regard, it will be suggested, Baudelaire's aesthetic has important redeeming qualities.