{"id":1285,"date":"2021-04-09T11:17:12","date_gmt":"2021-04-09T11:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/?p=1285"},"modified":"2021-04-09T11:17:17","modified_gmt":"2021-04-09T11:17:17","slug":"200th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-baudelaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/2021\/04\/09\/200th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-baudelaire\/","title":{"rendered":"200th anniversary of the birth of Baudelaire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Charles
Charles Baudelaire, 1821-1867 – the poet’s poet<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Today\nis the 200th<\/sup> anniversary of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire \u2013 a poet\nassociated with the emergence of literary modernism and the figure of the urban\nwanderer; the flaneur<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nfl\u00e2neur<\/em> is the prime urban walker and\nrecorder in literature.  The fl\u00e2neur\u2019s <\/em>impression of the city is\nformed through walking and is thus shaped at street level, through the\nconfusion and immediacy of the urban sensual phenomena of the crowd.  From the crowd emerge the individual \u2018urban\ntypes\u2019 that populate Baudelaire\u2019s Les\nFleurs du Mal<\/em> (1857).  Baudelaire\u2019s\npoetry is that of the fl\u00e2neur<\/em> (along\nwith other marginal figures), who has, in some form, inhabited the city in\nliterature since Edgar Allan Poe.  One of\nthe most famous statements on modernity and the modern metropolis is in Baudelaire\u2019s\nessay on the artist Constantin Guys in  \u2018The Painter of Modern Life\u2019: \u2018modernity is the\ntransitory, the fugitive, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other half\nbeing the eternal and the immutable\u2019.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baudelaire isolates the ragpicker and the fl\u00e2neur<\/em> (along with the prostitute) as\ntypes with whom he associates himself as a poet. The ragpicker is the epitome\nof human misery in the city, collecting rags to be used in industrial processes.  The affinity between the ragpicker and the\npoet arises from a coincidence of activity \u2013 as Baudelaire also sees himself\ncollecting social refuse from the city street and fashioning it into a\nprecarious living.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baudelaire\u2019s fl\u00e2neur<\/em>\noccupies a very particular time and place and is of a class that is able to\nindulge in strolling as a pastime.  His\narena is initially that of the boulevards, but with the advent of the arcades\nhe finds his perfect environment.  Here\nhe can be an observer, and a peruser of the commodities in the arcades, as well\nas a commodity spectacle to be observed. \nHe is a man, according to the 20th<\/sup> century critic Walter\nBenjamin, who goes \u2018botanizing on the asphalt\u2019 and who is at home in the street.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Baudelaire\u2019s poem \u2018To a Passer-by\u2019\ninvests the crowd with a potential to offer exciting but fleeting metropolitan\nencounters.  The poet describes a brief\nand anonymous encounter with a beautiful widow who is borne to him and away\nfrom him by the crowd. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To\na Passer-By<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The street\nabout me roared with a deafening sound.
\nTall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
\nA woman passed, with a glittering hand
\nRaising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agile and\ngraceful, her leg was like a statue’s.
\nTense as in a delirium, I drank
\nFrom her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
\nThe sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lightning\nflash… then night! Fleeting beauty
\nBy whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
\nWill I see you no more before eternity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elsewhere,\nfar, far from here! too late! never<\/em> perhaps!
\nFor I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
\nO you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William\nAggeler, The Flowers of Evil<\/em> (Fresno, CA: Academy Library\nGuild, 1954)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2018What this sonnet communicates is simply\nthis:\u2019 Benjamin writes, \u2018far from experiencing the crowd as an opposed,\nantagonistic element, this very crowd brings to the city dweller the figure\nthat fascinates. The delight of the urban poet is love – not at first sight,\nbut at last sight\u2019.  The way in which the\ncrowd conveys this mysterious beauty to the gaze of the poet illustrates both\nthe anonymity and the fascination of the crowd. \nHowever, Baudelaire\u2019s attitude to the crowd as ambivalent. It is\nBaudelaire\u2019s very status as a poet that prevents him becoming fully immersed in\nthe city; both his class position and his professed role as dispassionate\nobserver must separate him from the mass. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The complexity of an environment\nemerging from these conditions requires a mode of expression equal to its\nvolatility.  Consequently, Baudelaire\u2019s\npoetic project was to create a prose adequate to the metropolis of his\nage.  Baudelaire as a poet, seeks an\nurban poetics adequate to both the rational and the phantasmagorical elements\nof urban experience.  In an echo of the\ntwo parts that constitute modernity, he wrote of his own poetry:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who among us\nhas not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose,\nmusical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to\nthe lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and the sudden\nleaps of consciousness.  This obsessive\nidea is above all a child of the experience of giant cities, of the\nintersecting of their myriad relations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nBaudelaire seeks is a mode of representation that engages with the eternal and\n(seemingly) immutable physical metropolis in terms which at the same time are\nable to capture the ephemeral and fugitive interrelations he finds so\ncompelling. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the 200th anniversary of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire \u2013 a poet associated with the emergence of literary modernism and the figure of the urban wanderer; the flaneur. The fl\u00e2neur is the prime urban walker and recorder in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/312"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1286,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions\/1286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}