Baudelaire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2009
Summary
Baudelaire, more than any French poet before him, is the poet of consciousness of sin: man is a fallen creature, trapped in a material world far inferior to the spiritual paradise which has perennially haunted human dreams. Much of the tension of Baudelaire's work stems from opposite polarities, the endless conflict between degraded human nature and aspiration, between wilful self-possession and the pleasures of self-abandonment, between journeys to exotic dreamlands and plunges into the gouffre. But instead of falling passive victim to the contradictions of the human fate, the poet tries to transcend them through beauty, his aim being to ‘extraire l'or du fumier du réel’, to cultivate radiant flowers from the morass of evil – hence the title of his major volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (1857), from which the poems in the present anthology – except Recueillement – are taken. Woman has a particular place in this region of Baudelaire's inspiration, being the symbolic focus of the essential duality: on the one hand, the figure which tantalizes and is never wholly possessed, which man transfigures and even deifies in his imagination; on the other hand, the fatal force which draws man to degrade himself and sell his soul in the sophisticated hell of carnality.
Baudelaire defines the function of his poetry as ‘une aspiration humaine vers une beauté supérieure’, his belief in a world of superior beauty being based as much on his own sensitive contact with the outside world as on any specifically religious awareness.
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- An Anthology of Modern French Poetry (1850–1950) , pp. 23 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1976