(Pierre Emmanuel seminal study of Baudelaire's Fleurs du M...)
Pierre Emmanuel seminal study of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal argues that the poet was neither a conventional Catholic or a Satanist but a spiritual seeker. Chapters include "Erotic Religion", "Archetype", "Aesthetic Spirituality" and "God's Part." THis first-rate scholarly work originally appearing in France in 1967 includes a preface, chronology, abbreviations, translator's notes, bibliography, lists of poems by number and title, and index of personal names. 189pp. No Baudelaire scholar should skip this one. main01
Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems
(Here, for the first time, the work of three of Frances gr...)
Here, for the first time, the work of three of Frances greatest poets has been published in a single volume: the sensual and passionate glow of Charles Baudelaire, the desperate intensity and challenge of Arthur Rimbaud, and the absinthe-tinted symbolist songs of Paul Verlaine.
To bring the essence of these three giants of modern poetry to the American public, Joseph M. Bernstein, a noted interpreter and translator of French literature, has selected the most representative of their writings and presented them along with a biographical and critical introduction.
"Not to know these three poets", he points out, "is to deprive oneself of a pleasure as rare as it is indispensable to any real understanding of the aims and direction of modern literature.
The volume includes Arthur Symons' unabridged translation of Flowers of Evil and the Prose Poems of Baudelaire; Louise Varese's translation of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and Prose Poems from "Illuminations"; J. Norman Cameron's translation of the verse from the Illuminations; and a representative selection from Verlaine's verse translated by Gertrude Hall and Arthur Symons.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was the French author, the poet of the modern metropolis and was one of the first great French precursors of the symbolists.
Background
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821, in Paris. His father, Joseph François Baudelaire, had been a friend of the philosophers C. A. Helvétius and A. N. de Condorcet and tutor to the young sons of the Duc de Choiseul Praslin. His mother, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays Baudelaire, was born in London in exile in 1793 and died at Honfleur in 1871. In February 1827, when Baudelaire was not yet 6, his father's death led to a period of very close intimacy with his mother, for whom the boy felt a passionate love. Her remarriage near the end of the following year to the handsome officer Jacques Aupick must have seemed to her son a cruel betrayal. Baudelaire's stepfather, a capable and resolute man, rose to the rank of general, was named minister to Turkey in 1848 and ambassador to Spain in 1851, and in 1853 became a senator. But his nature was different from Baudelaire's, and he took a very dim view of his stepson's desire to be a poet.
Education
Charles attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law.
Career
Charles was permitted to enjoy student life for two years, but his family became alarmed over his extravagant habits. He was sent on a voyage to India which was intended to keep him out of mischief for two years. He was in Paris again early in 1841 after an absence of only seven months; but much as he disliked it, the voyage had a decisive influence on his poetry. The sights, sounds, and scents of the tropics were responsible for the rich exotic imagery of some of his greatest work. Baudelaire reached his majority two months after his return and came into possession of a patrimony of some 75, 000 francs.
In 1844 Charles's horrified family discovered that he had spent half his capital. In 1847 the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published and Baudelaire was prosecuted for writing an immoral work. The court ordered the suppression of six poems and condemned the poet to a fine of three hundred francs which was subsequently reduced to fifty.
In spite of his professed contempt for the bourgeois, Baudelaire was upset by his conviction and made an attempt to rehabilitate himself by standing as a candidate for the French Academy; he later withdrew on the advice of Sainte-Beuve.
The second edition of Les Fleurs du mal appeared in 1861. The six condemned poems were omitted, but the new poems which were written to replace them included some of his greatest work. For some years Baudelaire had been toying with the idea of making a stay in Belgium, where there was no censorship, in the hope of arranging for a new and unexpurgated edition of his work, earning some money by lecturing, and gaining a respite from his creditors. He left for Brussels in April 1864.
In April 1865, while visiting the Jesuit church of Saint-Loup at Namur, he had a stroke. He was partially paralyzed and unable to speak coherently. Baudelaire's strong influence can be seen in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Richard Dehmel in Germany; Ruben Darío in Latin America; A. C. Swinburne and Arthur Symons in England; and Hart Crane in the United States. A number of poets have translated Les Fleurs du mal into English. None of the existing versions is entirely satisfactory, but the best-known of them are those of Symons, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Roy Campbell.
Baudelaire's imagination and moral nature were deeply rooted in his Catholic background, and though his gloomy conception of humanity doomed by original sin is not alleviated by any assurance of salvation, it is important to recognize that Baudelaire does keep for man's spiritual nature a dimension of eternity. He received the last rites of the Catholic Church.
Views
Quotations:
"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."
Personality
Charles's works testify, that he had intellectual, ethical, religious, and esthetic speculations, commenting on love and women, boredom, and material progress.
There is constant evidence of Baudelaire's moral and intellectual elegance, of his dandyism, and of his violent antipathy to the society of his day; but above all, one is conscious in these pages of his inner distress - his fears and longings and his sense of the loneliness of the human situation.
Charles was frank with friends and enemies, rarely took the diplomatic approach and sometimes responded violently verbally, which often undermined his cause.
Connections
It was probably in 1844 that he met Jeanne Duval, a mulatto woman who played walk-on parts in small Paris theaters. Her influence on his poetry is not in doubt. Although they led a cat-and-dog life and the affair dragged on until 1860, she was the catalyst which released his powers and inspired the finest of the three love cycles in Les Fleurs du mal. About 1847 he met the second of his mistresses, Marie Daubrun.
Charles was, like Jeanne Duval, an actress, but was considerably more successful. Although she appears to have consoled the poet during his breaches with Jeanne Duval, it is doubtful whether she ever cared deeply for him. Her final abandonment of him in 1859 produced one of the most remarkable of his poems, A une Madone, which appears in the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Mme.
Apollonie Sabatier was the second of his mistresses in order of fame but not of time. She inspired the cycle of the "White Venus, " which is markedly inferior to the cycles of Jeanne Duval and Marie Daubrun. She was a high-class kept woman who was first supported by a wealthy Belgian Jew named Mosselman. She developed a taste for the arts and used to entertain some of the leading writers of the day - Gautier, Flaubert, Dumas, and the Goncourts - at dinner at her house on Sundays.
The following year Baudelaire began writing anonymous love letters to her, enclosing a number of poems which were later included in her cycle. Apollonie was a gay, kindly, entertaining woman who gave herself freely to her friends.
It is strange that she should have been cast by the poet for the role of Sacred Love to provide a foil to the Profane Love of Jeanne Duval. The incident which brought the affair to an end in 1857 remains a mystery.