In this, my fourth lecture on Charles Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du Mal I want to discuss Baudelaire's theory of poetry. I want to discuss his theory of poetry through the various images and roles Baudelaire articulates or projects as doubles of the poet as well as through the various statements he makes outside of his poetry.

Let's start with a discussion of a few of the explicit statements Baudelaire made about poetry. I want to take as our starting point quotation 8:

Baudelaire is making a simple but important point here. Art involves conscious effort and reflexion. The poet is someone who produces his work after a long apprenticeship and after careful deliberation. There is no room for chance, art is about the careful and elaborate production of objects of beauty. In his writings on art words like "travail", "labeur", "précision", "logique", "apprentissage" constantly reappear. Baudelaire was a particular admirer of the American poet Edgar Allen Poe, and in particular, his work The Philosophy of Composition in which he explained the processes by which he came to write his long poem, The Raven. In fact, in 1859, Baudelaire translated it as Genèse d'un poème. He also - in a clear sideswipe at the early French Romantics - made a scornful reference to "les amateurs du délire". For the Romantics, poetry was a matter of a "fine frenzy", a divinely inspired moment of vision, an inspired delirium. For Baudelaire however, poetry should be born of a long deliberation and should contain deliberately constructed effects. Moreover, Baudelaire breaks with the Romantic view of the poet as someone who suffers - although he is at times guilty of this - and replaces it with the image of the poet as someone who toils for his art. The poet as master craftsman, technician, specialist.

We can see in Baudelaire's poetry an intense engagement and preoccupation with formal or aesthetic concerns. The "travail du poète" is manifest on every page. His predeliction for the sonnet and for other short and formally challenging formats is apparent throughout Les Fleurs du Mal. Moreover, in every poem one can see an intense concern with phonic or sound patterns, internal rhymes, internal duplications, symmetry, subtle assonance and dissonance, and striking and unusual imagery that breaks away from the dead hand of cliché and convention.

Just take a look at a few examples to see what I mean:

To illustrate Baudelaire's concern with form, and, more specifically, with functionalizing form, that is to say,making form an integral part of the theme of a poem, let's take a look at a poem called `Sed non satiata':

The title, taken from the Latin poet Juvenal and alluding to the insatiable sexual appetite of Messalina, anticipates the two main themes of the poem: that of sexual desire and that of exoticism or foreignness evoked by the use of a Latin title. The first line confirms this sense of the exotic and the strange with the words "Bizarre déité". The word `bizarre' is explicit but `déité' instead of the more usual `déesse' implicitly underlines the strangeness.

The rhymes are also extremely rich. In the Landais and Barré rhyming dictionary used by many poets in the nineteenth century including Baudelaire, there are over 160 words ending in `-ane', only seven ending `-vane' but only four ending `-avane'. Interestingly, Baudelaire chooses the richest rhyme possible and manages to include into his poem all four rhyming words in the French language which end in `-avane' - a rare feat. These rhymes then are both rich and also extremely rare and thus underline the theme of exoticism. `Havane', `savane' and `caravane' all connote foreignness, a sense of dépaysement and the other rhyme `se pavane' - meaning to flaunt, or strut around like a peacock expresses the aggressive sexual desire of the woman in the poem. These four rhymes are feminine but the masculine rhymes in the poem - `nuits'/`minuits'/`ennuis' - suggest the danger and darkness of the sexual allure of the woman in the poem. Baudelaire then manages quite skilfully to functionalize the use of rhyme, that is to say, make it serve the themes of the poem. Moreover, there are two nouns whose gender at first seems to be wrong - `le nuits' (a burgundy called Nuits-Saint-Georges) and `le constance' (an African wine called Constantia) - but which are both, in fact correct, since they refer to types of wine. This grammatical gender ambiguity introduces the theme of sexual ambiguity and the bisexual nature of the poet's lover who, dissatisfied with his sexual prowess seeks satisfaction with another woman. Some critics, including Baudelaire's biographer Claude Pichois, have see an oblique sexual reference in the proper noun Proserpine whose final syllable means penis (la pine).

What emerges from Baudelaire's theory of poetry again and again is the belief that all art must rise above the demands of conventional morality, political pressure and religious edicts. Let's look at quotations 9 and 10:

Let's quickly put these two comments in their proper historical context. Greatly oversimplifying, one could describe the development of modern art in terms of a distinct movement towards a greater autonomy in the definition and practice of art. The category of `beauty' and the domain of beautiful objects was first constituted, first came into being in the period known as the Renaissance. These beautiful objects were an intinsic part of both the life of the court and of the church. In the course of the eighteenth century, literature, the fine arts and music became institutionalized as activities independant of sacred and courtly life. Finally, around the middle of the nineteenth century there emerged the aestheticist conception of art which encouraged the artist to produce his/her work in accordance with the distinct consciousness of art for art's sake. This was a response to the commercialization of art and the book market which began to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. Let us call this process the commodification of culture. When we reach Baudelaire, this retreat of art from everyday life became more pronounced. With Baudelaire poetry alienates itself from the public sphere and withdraws into the the untouchableness of complete autonomy. Baudelaire joins Flaubert in his belief that the work of art ss beyond all social utility.

Let's move on to the various images, metaphors and comparisons Baudelaire makes in his work. The following list is not exclusive but here are some of the most important ways, analogies, adjectives and metaphors Baudelaire used to describe the poet:

i) The Poet as Maudit

The poet as a doomed outcast, rejected by the mass of humanity. A lonely outsider forever doomed to be misunderstood. Gifted with vision and sensitivity but incomprehensible to his fellow men and women. The first twenty- one poems of Les Fleurs du mal all relate to the question of art: to the problems encountered by the artist and to the nature of beauty. `Bénédiction' and `L'Abatros' form a general introduction. They portray the poet as the Romantics had shown him earlier: an outcast, a victim, an outsider, an exile from society. Despite this, other poems deal with the positive forces art can generate. `Élévation' and `Correspondances' give the poet's vision of ecstasy. The poet is gifted with the faculty to perceive beauty, harmony and illumination.

The concept of the poet as maudit may be related to certain key historical developments in France. The nineteenth century was essentially the century of the bourgeoisie. The revolution of 1789 was essentially a `bourgeois revolution' (André Lefèbvre) it this class becoming the main beneficiaries of revolution and its retombées. The bourgeoisie was ideally positioned to monopolize positions in government, administration and the military vacated by the aristocracy. Opportunities arose for men of initiative, education and wealth rather than birth.

Although Baudelaire was born into bourgeoisie he felt alienated from its culture and its politics. The progressive pretentions of the bourgeoisie, their stress on conformity and commodities all revolted him. Little wonder then that Baudelaire should so frequently characterize himself as an outcast, a pariah out of synch with his time.

At the time of Baudelaire's writing political and cultural authority in France was vested in a vain and parochial caesar (Napoléon III). Certain artists, like Baudelaire and Flaubert felt that they had no choice but to withdraw from engaging with a wider public.

To explain the analogy between the poet and the alchemist let's look at quotation 7:

Central to the mediaeval alchemist and to Baudelaire's conception of the poet is the idea of transformation or transubstantiation. Just as the mediaeval alchemist sought to turn base metal into gold, so the poet seeks to turn or transubstantiate the ugly, the everyday, the banal into the beautiful, the exquisite, the entoxicating. Another image Baudelaire uses is of `extraction', extracting beauty from the ugly and the evil. This attempt or process involves a fascination with evil, transgression, deviation, sin, otherness in all its forms. In a sketch for an epilogue to the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal Baudelaire makes this analogy cristal clear:

The notion of the poet as alchemist is implicit in the ambiguity of the title, Les Fleurs du mal. On a simple level, this can be translated as - as it is commonly translated - The Flowers of Evil. However, one might equally translate the `du' as meaning `from' or `out of'. The translated title then becomes Flowers from Evil or Flowers out of Evil. The poet transforms evil, suffering, sickness - `mal' is a tricky word to translate too - into a thing of beauty.

One of the things Les Fleurs du mal is all about is the extraction of powerful sensual impressions from unexpected sources. The distillation of quintessences through the exploitation of contrasts: tender and violent, sweet and foul. Baudelaire was a lodestar for the Surrealists insofar as he sought alternatives to conventional imagery. In `Le Soleil' Baudelaire compares the poet with the sun as both can ennoble the most banal:

Turning defeat into something positive: the failure of man to escape spleen in turned into a volume of poetry, the everyday life of the metropolis is revealed to have its own poetry. Indeed, it is in the city poems that Baudelaire's transformation of `le laid' into `le beau' can be seen at its best. In `Les septs vieillards', `Les petites vieilles' and `Les Aveugles' Baudelaire finds spectacles of horror which both attract and repell him. The opening lines of `Les petites vieilles' is particularly interesting in this respect:

In the city poems Baudelaire finds beauty in ugliness, in strangeness, repulsion and fear. `Les petites vieilles' is a particularly sadistic poem in its de-feminized and de-humanized description of the old women the poet sees wandering the city streets. In `Les Aveugles', it is the blind beggars roaming the streets who provide Baudelaire with the pretext of the poem - an investigation of seeing and non-seeing, blindness and insight. These blind beggars are doubles of the poet, searching for answers and some peace amind the chaos of modern life. The most famous (infamous) example of Baudelaire's alchemical experiments is the so-called love poem called `Une Charogne' in which the decaying carcass of a dead dog is described and used to express a truth about the nature of human love.

Baudelaire's poems, particularly his city poems, are marked by an interest in street cleaners and scavengers of one sort or another. Primary amongst these marginal figures is the rag-picker as immortalized in the poem `Le Vin des chiffoniers'. There is a picture of a rag-picker on page 11 of your handout. The rag-picker is a man or woman who sifts through "les débris d'une journée de la capitale" the detritus, the flotsom and jetsom as it were, of the city streets in search of objects of value ("des objets d'utilité ou de jouissance") which they then might sell to make a living.

Walter Benjamin describes Baudelaire's use of the rag- picker as an extended metaphor of the poetic activity itself, an imaginative transformation of the city and all its discarded or neglected riches. Indeed, of all the faces of the poet this appears to be Baudelaire's favourite. Baudelaire positions himself as poet firmly at the end of the cycle of the production, consumption, disposal and recuperation of material objects, which is the cycle that so deeply preoccupied nineteenth-century writers, and, perhaps, Balzac most of all.

What also links the poet with the ragpicker is his apartness and his parasitical and largely nocturnal existence in the interstices of urban life.

Walter Benjamin p.74

The flâneur is a compulsive observer of modern life but is always on the outside, distracted and fragmented by the experience. The flâneur was of bourgeois origin but déclassé (outside class) to the extent that he could never fully participate in bourgeois social life or, indeed, in the social life of the masses. The flâneur could mingle with the crowd but never totally merge with it.

Baudelaire is fascinated by the ambiguities, the dangers and pleasures of modern urban living. However, he sought to distance himself from modern urban living and become a critical observer of modernity. In this respect Baudelaire may be seen as an early antagonist to mass culture. In the role of the flâneur he found the figure who could confront commodification without being negated by it. Interest in, but ultimate separation from the crowd. This defines the flâneur. Flânerie is an exercise in connaisseurship, in expert looking. The skill of the flâneur lies in dominating, mastering, classifying and making sense of the urban scene whilst not yet being a part of it.

To be open to the city is, according to Baudelaire, to invite a potential mutilation, a maiming of human and poetic impulses against which various strategies of self-defence need to be devised. In `Le Soleil' the poet describes himself as a fencer making offensive forays into the urban scene but also obliged to make defensive parries:

Je vais m'exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,

The poet must retain a critical and ironic distance from the city and its crowds. He must be forever on guard and make only sporadic attacks against the city and modern life.

Qu'est-ce que l'art? Prostition. (Baudelaire)

In the prose poem `Les Foules', the poet describes his work as a "sainte prostitution". In `Les Foules' the city is a scene of attraction and seduction in which the crowd appears variously as mistress, wife, harlot with the artists in the role of husband, lover, client taking possession of a maleable female body. However, this position of mastery soon breaks down and the poet describes himself as a kind of prostitute, forever open to penetration by the city and its denizens.

Industrial society produces its human rejects and the poet himself joins the beggar, the rag-picker and the prostitute in becoming a commodity necessary to the functionning of that society but rejected to the margins of this society which devalues love and commercializes desire. The poet, like the prostitute, is a figure necessary to the fonctionning of society but resented by that very society. Although for Walter Benjamin, the prostitute represents commodity and seller in one, for Baudelaire the poet is the most devalued commodity, abandonned and offered to the crowd.

In the nineteenth century, particularly, the last fifty years the bourgeoisie became increasingly dominant in France. Baudelaire's writing becomes increasingly marked by an anti-bourgeois stance and a striving towards an essentially élitist, aristocratic ideal. These anti-bourgeois tendencies converge in his self-styled dandyism. Dandyism is not just about dressing well, it is about individual revolt and the elevation of beauty. It is against any utilitary and money-grabbing outlook on life - "Etre un homme utile m'a toujours paru quelque chose de bien hideux".

Baudelaire adored the work and the image of the American writer Edgar Allen Poe. Baudelaire knew his work well since between 1848 and 1865 he had produced translations of Poe's work. Poe, according to Baudelaire, was an exemplary figure of revolt against the values and norms of bourgeois life. Baudelaire particularly relished the irony of a southern aristocrat living in the land of democracy. Moreover, Poe was positively heroic in his capacity to live as an outcast. In his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe Baudelaire was notoriously criticial of the USA and condemed its vulgar materiaism and disdain for genius. Baudelaire's Poe is not really based on actual facts about the real Poe. Baudelaire's Poe is made up of truths, half-truths and falsehoods. It is an imaginative and idiosyncratic construction. Baudelaire's Poe was the very symbol of male stylishness and affectation: brilliant and cultivated yet attracted to dissipation in all its forms, constantly shocking others but never shockable himself and addicted to unconventional and paradoxical positions. Moreover, Poe appealed to Baudelaire because of his interest in the supernatural (visionary Poe) as well as his concern with aesthetic issues (logical Poe). According to Michel Lemaire, the dandy is "un être en situation" (Le Dandysme de Baudelaire à Mallarmé, 1978 p.10) engaged in an active rebellion with society.

The poet as an outcast out of sympathy with the public and the prevailing ideology, still chasing an ideal that he knows to be hopelessly unreal and unrealizable. In a number of prose poems, in particular `Le Vieux Saltimbanque' the poet likens himself to a jester and street performer.