solitary business

The poets find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse....  One year before Baudelaire wrote "Le Vin des chiffonniers," he published a prose description of the figure: "Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day's refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful and gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess Industry." This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping; they even move about the same way.

—Walter Benjamin,  Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940 (Belnap Press, 1996), p. 48., Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, editors

contemporaneity

George Steiner often insists that the concept of “contemporaneity” should be taken into serious consideration. For instance, it is crucial to know that Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire lived at the exact same time in order to understand the deep relevance of one’s work to the other’s. Manet’s fascination with eroticism and modernity coexisted with a more classical touch, which was rooted in a long tradition of painting. In that sense, when his oeuvre was presented in 2011 at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, naming him the “man who invented modernity,” such a claim could only be accurate if related to the perpetuation of certain traditions. Modernity exists alongside tradition. And Baudelaire stands in a similar position. The literary critic Antoine Compagnon famously described his poems as “antimodern,” meaning that they were written as much in contradiction to as in close relation to modernity. Therefore, Baudelaire’s poems and Manet’s paintings, which may seem to be produced in parallel realities, indeed have a lot in common.

—Donatien Grau, The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]

price and peril

I’m going to read you his [Baudelaire’s] poem called The Albatross. It’s a famous poem, and rightly so. Here is the poet before the awful pride carried away his hopes. Here is the poet as misfit and vulnerable. Behold, as Nietzsche wrote, the man!

   Sometimes, to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
   Lure upon deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
   Birds of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
   Flying in slow and elegant circles above the mast.

   No sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
   Than this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
   Goes hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
   His great wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.

   How droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and weak—
   He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
   They tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his beak;
   Another mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.

   The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
   A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
   Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
   He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.*

This poem, I think, captures the poet and the predicament in the same net. Here is the price—and the peril. The journals say nothing that the spirit-bird of this verse does not soar above, and leave far behind. This verse stands as a tribute to the ravishing, indelible, undeniable, body of what he was able to accomplish during his short time on earth. The belled reminder of his star-graces, after all that subterranean din.

—Yahia Lababidi, The Artist As Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi (Onesuch Press, 2010) by Alex Stein.

*Richard Howard translation, Les Fleurs Du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (Godine, 1985)

recognized wrong

Thus a wrong—an injustice—done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which to ordinary apprehension appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice, never where it does not exist, but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever.

—Charles Baudelaire, “Further Notes on Edgar Poe,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Press, 1964), translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne.

intervene in the deepest part

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself: not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. Valéry and Stefan George leave us where we picked them up, or else make us more demanding on the formal level of the mind: they are geniuses we have no need of, they are merely artists. But a Shelley, but a Baudelaire, but a Rilke intervene in the deepest part of our organism which annexes them as it would a vice.

—E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard (Arcade Publishing, 1998)