Blistering Pages of Poetry Laid Bare Baudelaire's Blues

Baudelaire is fundamentally a romantic in both senses of the word—as a member of an intellectual and artistic movement that championed sublime passion and the heroism of the individual and as a poet of erotic verse.

"Always be a poet, even in prose", wrote Charles Baudelaire whose highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarme among many others. He is credited with coining the term 'Modernite' (modernite) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Furthermore, Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) published in 1857, expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Among all the French poets he is the most noted one for macabre imagery and evocative language. He was the flagbearer of the Decadent Movement in literature. Abandoning verse poetry as his medium, Baudelaire concentrated on writing prose poems, a sequence of 20 of which was published in La Presse in 1862.Charles Baudelaire is perhaps the most influential of the Symbolists. Baudelaire is fundamentally a romantic in both senses of the word—as a member of an intellectual and artistic movement that championed sublime passion and the heroism of the individual and as a poet of erotic verse. As an inscrutable sphinx, he wrote in his poem 'Beauty' "O mortals, I am beautiful, like a stone dream,/and my breast, where each man has bruised his soul,/is created to inspire in poets a goal/as eternal and mute as matter might seem." Thus for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man (as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice) in favour of a new urban sensibility and an awareness of individual moral complexity. In his imagery he uses urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse and sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. He considered the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarme who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard. In 'Death of Lovers" he wrote "We will have beds filled with light scent, and/couches deep as a tomb,/and strange flowers in the room, /blooming for us under skies so pleasant." In 1847, Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Edgar Allan Poe in which he found tales and poems that had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but never taken shape. Baudelaire saw in Poe a precursor and tried to be his French contemporary counterpart.. From this time until 1865, he was largely occupied with translating Poe's works; and his translations were widely praised. Baudelaire was not the first French translator of Poe, but his 'scrupulous translations' were considered among the best. In a poem like 'Beatrice' he expresses his idea of woman in the queer and weird words "The queen of my heart, with her matchless look,/laughing with them at my dark distress,/and now and then yielding a filthy caress."

He was a strong supporter of the Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix. Baudelaire called him 'a poet in painting'. Baudelaire also absorbed much of Delacroix's aesthetic ideas as expressed in his journals. His romantic poems are no less interesting for the imageries. In his poem 'To She Who is Too Light-hearted' he sounds romantic -Your head, your gesture, your air/ are lovely, like a lovely landscape / laughter's alive in your face / a fresh breeze in a clear atmosphere. Baudelaire elaborated in his 'Salon of 1846', grave and lofty melancholy that shines with a dull light. Still Baudelaire's imageries persistently reflect 'melancholy' and 'feverishness' as in the poems like 'The Ransom', 'The Poison',' The Cat', 'Autumn Song', 'The Irreparable', 'Morning Twilight' ' The Death of the Poor' The Owls' ,'The Flawed Bell' Exotic Perfume' , 'A Phantom II' and many others which have interesting titles.

In 'Sorrows of the Moon' he wrote "The moon dreams more languidly this evening:/like a sweet woman, in the pillows, at rest, /with her light hand, discretely stroking, /before she sleeps, the curve of her breast,/dying, she gives herself to deep trance,/and casts her eyes over snow-white bowers,/on the satined slope of a soft avalanche,/rising up into the blue, like flowers."

Charles Baudelaire was born on April 9 in 1821 in Paris and died on August 31 leaving behind the notable works La Fanfarlo, Le Cygne, Le Peintre de la vie modern, Le Voyage, Les Paradis articiels. Baudelaire's poetic masterpiece, the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, consists of 126 poems arranged in six sections of varying length. Baudelaire always insisted that the collection was not a 'simple album' but had 'a beginning and an end,' each poem revealing its full meaning only when read in relation to the others within the 'singular framework' in which it is placed. He attempts to find fulfillment love through a succession of real women Jeanne Duval, Apollonie Sabatier, and Marie Daubrun and many others . Each set of love poems describes an erotic cycle that leads from intoxication through conflict and revulsion to an eventual ambivalent tranquillity born of memory and the transmutation of suffering into art.

He kept himself going on a diet of opium, digitalis, belladonna and brandy in the Belgium hotel during the last phase of his life. The ailing, alienated Baudelaire would conclude, "Shall we say that the world has become uninhabitable for me?" In March 1866 he suffered a second stroke, which soon led to partial paralysis and aphasia. At 40, Baudelaire was a shadow of his former self, crushed by unrepayable debts, suffering the aftereffects of a seemingly minor stroke, and facing the onset of syphilitic debility. By 1866, he even found it hard to stand. "Vertigos and repeated vomiting for three days," he noted. "I was obliged to lie on my back … for even when crouching on the floor, I kept falling over, headlong." A new translation of 'Late Fragments' reveals the great French poet's wit and foresight. Baudelaire had a dream project of translating Petronius's Satyricon as he found some affinity with his own dark nights of the soul or the grotesqueries of life in Belgium where he had rented room 39 in Brussels's Hotel du Grand Miroir. There he wrote a handful of final prose poems in one entitled 'Anywhere out of the World' where he wrote "Life is a hospital where each patient is driven by the desire to change beds." Such a pensée reminds us of the French moralist tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, yet Baudelaire always regarded Edgar Allan Poe, whom he translated, as his spiritual brother. The title of his poem of the last phase of his life 'My Heart Laid Bare,' is taken directly from Poe's 'Marginalia'. At every touch of his fiery pen, Baudelaire's blunt honesty reveals his ugly and misogynistic self. He in reality flaunts his divided soul torn between Sin and Redemption. Many regard him as the second greatest poet, the greatest being as Andre Gide remarked, 'Victor Hugo'. Gustave Flaubert crusaded against the hated middle class while Karl Marx transformed his hate into a politico-moral crusade. Baudelaire closes 'My Heart Laid Bare' with a vision of the world's end, caused by 'the degradation of the human heart,' and blistering pages indict a bourgeois culture of selfishness and mediocrity. This is why it is always a pleasure to find wisdom in Charles Baudelaire's mad scribbling.

By Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee

The writer is associate professor and head of the post graduate department of English at Dum Dum Motijheel College, Kolkota

Also Read: Interdisciplinary is the Way Forward in the Education System

Also Watch: