There is a long tradition of biographies of Wilde, starting with some by friends (and some enemies) who knew him personally and often twisted, changed, or left out facts about Wilde’s life because of personal motives. Among the first biographies of Wilde written by his contemporaries were those of Frank Harris (highly unreliable) and of André Gide (more reliable but very centered on Gide’s admiration, maybe even love, for Wilde).
The best scholarly biography of Oscar Wilde to date remains Richard Ellmann’s long and comprehensive Oscar Wilde, written in the late 1980s (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988) and barely finished before Ellmann’s death. A German scholar, Horst Schröder, has published numerous corrections to Ellmann’s biography over the years, which should be consulted/checked by anyone trying to ascertain facts about Wilde’s life just from using Ellmann’s book. Ellmann (and the editors who put together the last materials he left them to finish up) did not get everything right, it turns out; at this point in Oscar Wilde scholarship, however, his work is still held in very high regard and is the first stop for anyone seeking to learn about Wilde.
Stanford students: Ellmann’s biography is on reserve for our course at the Course Reserves Desk at Green Library, along with about 20 other important Wilde sources (such as his letters, interviews, etc.) and many other important works of Wilde scholarship.
To introduce you to Wilde’s life in overview mode, here is a brief biography(3 pages total to click through; ignore the pesky ads …). It is short but pretty good.
When reading the poem “The Venal Muse”, it can be established almost immediately that the poet Charles Baudelaire, or rather, the speaker of the poem, has an incredibly complicated relationship when it comes to his literary muse(s). The pairing of the words “venal” and “muse” as used in the title is indeed unusual, as the world “venal” typically carries quite negative connotations. For most people, “venal” conjures up images of manipulation, corruption, and money, whereas “muse” is one associated with meditation, peace, and inspiration. This stark contrast seems to accurately reflect the speaker’s attitude towards his muse as somewhat conflicted. In the first stanza, the speaker asks his muse a question—during the cold, dark winter, when I have nothing, will you be there to warm me up? This strongly implies a begrudging sense of dependence on the muse, which further sets the mood of ambivalence that continues on for the rest of the poem.
As discussed in class, there often seems to be a sense of nostalgia present in Baudelaire’s works. “The Venal Muse” is no exception, and phrases such as “knowing your purse and palette are both dry”, “half-burned logs”, “starving clown”, and “meagre evening bread” make further reference to Baudelaire’s crippling poverty with a tone of wistfulness. Although Baudelaire makes no reference to the past in this specific poem, his obvious frustration and anger in the present along with the references to his impoverished state make it clear that he would rather be in a different time.
The last line of the poem, “to bring amusement to the vulgar crowd”, was also quite interesting. Of course, “The Venal Muse” is obviously a translated version of the original French poem, so not all English versions will have this line. Either way, “vulgar” seems an odd way to describe a crowd, unless the spectacle itself was something negative. I as a reader was left confused as to which “crowd” Baudelaire was referring. This lack of clarity (at least for me) in the closing of the poem left me to reconsider the overarching meaning of the poem as a whole, along with the senses of ambivalence, melancholy, and nostalgia, common to Baudelaire’s poetry. -MG
Baudelaire’s representation of beauty and art in his poetry is quite peculiar in the way it embodies the ideals of the French decadence. In his paradoxical representation and overall personification of beauty in Hymn to Beauty, we can understand art more fully.
I will argue that Baudelaire’s reason for his juxtapositions in Hymn to Beauty to the point of paradoxes is for the reader to understand that beauty can be found in all forms of being:wretchedness and well-being as well as badness and goodness to name a few. In this way, Baudelaire is trying to show how beauty’s purpose should not be concerned with the form it takes, rather the immediate experience of it that makes life essentially better.
The first sentence of the poem begins by asking beauty itself whether it comes from heaven or hell. This line’s significance comes from the use of “or” as a disjunction or alternation between the two possible origins of beauty. In fact, Baudelaire uses “and” for all his representation of beauty in the remainder of the poem excluding the final two stanzas, which state the irrelevance of the comparisons. Then, in the last line of the stanza, Baudelaire states that it “bestows both kindnesses and crimes” and therefore “acts on us like wine”, representing beauty as both fickle and unpredictable.
The following four stanzas list the paradoxical ways in which beauty works. By stating “your eye contains the evening and the dawn” Baudelaire is showing how time does not affect beauty because it is present both day and night. Furthermore, the line “that can make heroes cold and children warm” works to show that it can give mercy to the helpless, yet wear away at the powerful. This effectively utilizes imagery to present the wide spectrum of beauty’s whim.
The fourth stanza is dedicated entirely to beauty’s awful ways. The purpose of this is most likely to profoundly present beauty in a way that is often unassociated with beauty–that beauty isn’t simply a thing found in good but also in evil and delving deep into the latter form.
The fifth stanza is rather interesting. It presents two moments of death, which would be associated with the more horrible side of beauty but then explains them with poetic imagery and deeper meaning. First, with the mayfly’s demise being “in flames, blessing this fire’s deadly bloom”, the image of a candle momentary bursting in light gives a meaning to the mayfly’s death. The second, with a “the panting lover bending to his love” which shows beauty in the love or bond the lover has with the departed person by stroking the corpse of his lover “like a dying man who strokes his tomb.” Once again giving meaning and significance to an awful moment.
Finally the final two stanzas explain how the broad range of forms beauty can take does not matter, declaring “what difference, then, from heaven or hell.” Whatever form beauty is experienced through by a person, its purpose is to “make The world less dreadful, and the time less dead.” which makes logical sense in that beauty’s form in darkness makes it a horrible moment less so and meaningful.
A creative, synaesthetic mind map of Wilde’s poem! This exercise is open for online students/visitors as well as Stanford students.
We’ll be discussing Wilde’s poetry in class this week, and “The Harlot’s House” is among the poems on which we will spend a little more time. For our second group close reading exercise, I’d like us to try something that we can really only do, in this particular fashion, in our online space. It is an exercise that calls for a creative visceral and sensual, rather than rational and verbal, interpretation.
Due: Sunday, October 8, 2012
Task: Let’s work on a group interpretation of Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” that uses visual images (or video if you like) and sounds to express certain aspects of the poem that you intuit or have already learned about (such as the poem’s gothic elements, its particular form, or representation of femininity, for example). Think about either a particular part of Wilde’s poem that lingers in your mind (a word, a phrase, a passage from the poem) or the poem as a whole, and find
either an image (a photo of a nightly street, a reproduction of a painting or statue, a nature photo altered with instagram, etc.)
or a video file (something you record yourself or that you find via youtube, etc.)
or a sound file (such as a particular piece of music, the sound of footsteps, a sound from nature, a voice reading another text, etc. etc.).
that, to you, represents something important about Wilde’s poem. Simply add your image/video/sound file (one or more) and your screen name or initials. If you like, you may write a sentence or two explaining why you picked this image/video/sound file in response to Wilde’s poem. That’s it!
Stanford students: Work from within the Dashboard post, as always. Scroll down to below the second set of stars (***) below. This is the space for your contribution. You can add an image, a video, or a sound file easily from there by first uploading it via the first button after “Upload/Insert,” or by linking to another file with the “Insert/edit/link” button [Alt+Shift+A]. Click on this brief tutorial , which will show you how to do this. You can link to another image on the web, to a youtube video (or you can shoot your own video and upload it to youtube or directly to this blog). Let me know if you have any technical trouble; you can always send the link or the file to me via email, and I’ll upload it for you.
Online visitors:You can link to images or video on the web by inserting the website address into your comment section below. We will respond to all your posts! Please join us.
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Oscar Wilde, The Harlot’s House-–Click here to find the poem online
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“Olympia” by Manet
1863
Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
“Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,”
This disturbing painting of a nineteenth-century courtesan (Olympia was a common nickname for prostitute in the 19th century; for more information, see T.J. Clark’s “Olympia’s Choice” in The Painting of Modern Life) could very well illustrate the verse: “Slim silhouetted skeletons.” Wilde’s poem is, in my opinion, a depiction of a brothel wherein dehumanized men and women meet. In the painting, Olympia’s enigmatic gaze along with her yellowy and cadaverous skin color is accusing the viewer, making the latter feel both guilty and uncomfortable. As it is the case for Wilde’s poem, a feeling of malaise, ennui, and fear emanates from this painting: what happens to the Self when it is reified and becomes a mere object of consummation (a mechanical grotesque, an automaton, a clockwork puppet, a horrible marionette)? Well, it’s a little like a when “the tune goes false:” something is wrong and then, we all can feel this disturbing eeriness… -R.C.
The above piece is Zbigniew Preisner–Les Marionettes. Very simple, stately, melancholy piece of piano music. I imagine grinning inhuman puppets dancing round and round to this.
Above: A picture I found on the web, of a deserted London city street at night. What’s missing here is a smoker under a street lamp, half in shadow.
Above: A 19th-century French female automaton (used to play a harp). She’s beautiful and eerie at the same time. Winding her up feels like a violation somehow. -petradt
The “Dance of Death,” (“Toytentantz” in Yiddish) from the 1937 production of An-sky’s 1914 play, The Dybbuk.
The eerie dance of automatons in Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” is also a dance phantoms and skeletons, where “the dead are dancing with the dead.” Wilde’s poem echoes the tradition of the Danse Macabre, which served as an especially important motif in both Jewish and Polish avant-garde theater (i.e. Wyspiański’s The Wedding, 1901). – Voland
LH’s links: 1). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFBfMv0qEWA;
(a link to a Youtube music clip entitled Rex Irae, by the Swiss band Celtic Frost. The beginning of the song is keenly suggestive of the mad, whirling atmosphere of the revellers–at least to me);
2). the following are paintings by Otto Dix, an expressionist painter whose work captures ennui and decay in a rich, original way that verges on (an sometimes spills over into) the grotesque. Prostitutes
Grosstadt
Portrait of Anita Berber
From WildeFranc
SONYA TAYEH’s choreography captures the physicality and pull of some dark force — the forces that I imagine in Oscar Wilde’s Harlot’s House as a contemporary dance. Sex, compulsion, manipulation, voyeurism, whore/pimp — lines from the poem: mechanical grotesques, fantastic arabesques, ghostly dancers spin, automatons, a phantom lover to her breast, sometimes a horrible marionette, etc. WildeFranc
This image from a Russian ballet reminded me a lot of “The Harlot’s House,” particularly in the lines: “Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed/ A phantom lover to her breast,/ Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.” Not only does ballet seem to correlate perfectly to Wild’s artistic style and French influence, but these dancers specifically are well suited to the dark and eery tones of this poem in particular. The garish costumes and makeup, the unnatural positioning, the contrast between the ballerina’s expression and her seemingly modest pose (thus implying a sexual element) all correlate well with “The Harlot’s House.” -J.S.W.
The poem immediately brought to mind Camille Saint-Saëns beautifully haunting Danse Macabre:
Saint-Saëns composed the piece in 1874, based on a poem by Henri Cazalis about death coming and playing a dance for his skeletons. I think the song elegantly captures both the lure and liveliness of the dance in the Harlot’s House and its danger. -LN
Although a childish image, I was instantly reminded of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas.
The poem emphasizes an almost forbidden ball, to which only other-worldly creatures are invited. Although sexuality is eminent in the poem, and the setting is a whore house, the visual description of these creatures was more poignant to me. In this particular song in the movie, the creatures of Halloween Town are inviting their viewers to enter a world of song, dance, gluttony, and fear. Their physiognomy is off-putting, their body parts are sown together or falling off, and they sing mechanically. The harlot’s house is terrifying just like Halloween Town, but even something as pure as “Love” cannot resist to enter. MCR
This poem quickly reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which was adapted to a film in 1983. The premise of Something Wicked This Way Comes is significantly darker than “The Harlot’s House,” as this trailer for the film aptly depicts. However, several of the themes highly dramatized in Something Wicked This Way Comes may be seen in “The Harlot’s House,” though less extremely. Something Wicked This Way Comes discusses the deepest, most hidden desires we have, and the dangers associated with sacrificing other elements to find them. Similarly, “The Harlot’s House” reflects the grim, grotesque search for fulfillment of hidden desires, most especially physical ones. Something Wicked This Way Comes and the poem both emphasize how fading the temporary fulfillment of these desires is. -M.P.
This link will direct you to the music video for the song “Bird of Flames,” a collaboration between the singer Chrysta Bell and the famous writer/director/artist David Lynch. The song is from Bell’s 2011 album This Train. (As a fair warning, I should say the video might be somewhat perturbing to those of you who are particularly sensitive to dark or bizarre imagery; those of you familiar with David Lynch’s work won’t be surprised by the video’s look and feel.) I think the video offers several suggestive contemporary parallels to the scene described in Wilde’s poem, perhaps even emphasizing what might have struck some as the dystopian note sounded by the 1885 poem. If, as Prof. Dierkes-Thrun invited us to suggest, the woman accompanying the male speaker of Wilde’s poem is the titular harlot, and it is, indeed, her house to which she is returning, perhaps we may think of what goes on in the video as what the harlot goes home to do, namely, to be a captive and to perform. In the video, a sorcerer of sorts seems to conjure her to life from a cocoon within which she is enveloped. She does, indeed, come to life, performing an alluring, enchanting, and spellbinding number for the seedy, shady denizens of the mysterious locale. One spectator, in particular, seems to fall for her over the course of the song. We might imagine that he feels more tenderness toward her than the other spectators, maybe even that he, like the speaker of Wilde’s poem, might wish for her, one day, not to return to her “house,” to escape altogether. Maybe he would help her. The video’s style emphasizes the smoky, exotic aspects of the locale and those found within it. In particular, the color green is used to give both people and place a reptilian sheen. The singer sings into a flower, a poetic trope not without its sexual reverberations as well as its associations with femininity and love (the most obvious of many possible symbolic associations). The editing of the video, cutting out frames to make the movements spastic and animalistic (that is, less human-like) seem to me more than suitable “adaptations” of some of Wilde’s lines about “strange mechanical grotesques,” “ghostly dancers,” “wire-pulled automatons,” “slim silhouetted skeletons” and “clockwork puppets.” The singer herself is made to look particularly doll-like, which may or may not render problematic the spectator’s infatuation with her, if he indeed sees in her, or women in general, something “doll-like.” I’d be happy to know whether or not the video resonated with anyone else. It seems to me many of the issues raised in class – voyeurism, exploitation, obsession, thanatic eroticism, and exoticism, are visible here. DJM
This clip is from Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. In this scene, the automaton Maria (an exact mechanical replica of the film’s heroine) seduces a crowd of aristocratic men. She appears before them scantily clad in Eastern garb and performs a number of erratic, erotic dance moves. She at once evokes images of Salomé and the Whore of Babylon. This pits the sensual, evil Maria against the Madonna-like good Maria, establishing a virgin/whore dichotomy. The inherent identity crisis—which is the real Maria?—is reminiscent of the ambiguity of character of the lover in “The Harlot’s House”: is she Love personified, or the harlot herself? The scene transitions to a depiction of Death and the Seven Deadly Sins, similar to the concept of the Danse Macabre others have mentioned. This is included to suggest the imminence of death and the ephemerality of the moment. Alcibiades.
This video is a reading of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Because I could Not Stop For Death”. This poem reminded me of “The Harlot House” first because of the coupling between its rhythm and its content. The rhythm of the poem, which seems to be a slow yet steadfast movement–almost even dragging movement, reflects the inexorable movement of the carriage od Death taking the speaker towards her last day. However, the themes of the poem were also reminiscent of a number of themes in “The Harlot House.” Indeed, we find the same idea of a coupling between sex and death. The speaker personifies Death as a young, charming Prince who is taking her away on a carriage. However, this ride is ominous as it is leading her to her downfall. What is more, the speaker’s dress is reminiscent of “The Harlot House” both because it is scant clothing and because of the frailty it is portrayed with, which links the speaker to the dark leaves of Wilde’s poem, which could be dark because they are burnt, and therefore about to crumble. Finally, the notions of time are blurred, as the Speaker shares that ” tis centuries yet seems shorter than the day”. This is reminiscent of the many contradictory indications in “The Harlot House”, like the contrasts between inside and outside, the organic and the artificial, the passive and the active, and the fast versus the slow, many of which are similarly found in Dickinson’s poem. – CAN
After reading the poem, my mind went to Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film Moulin Rouge!, particularly the scene, “El Tango de Roxanne.” The way the tango is danced in this scene juxtaposes passion with violence, bringing the depiction of lust to the fore of the dance. The music, sung mostly by the unexpectedly rough voice of a dancer, joins a discordant violin in creating a sense of fear and anxiety in the midst of what seems like a beautifully choreographed dance. This “problematizing” of a normally graceful and social activity – dancing – is exactly what Wilde does with the waltzes and quadrilles of his poem. The theme of prostitution is also prominent here, both in the dancer who playacts the prostitute in the dance, and in the fact that the main character is losing his love to the lust of a richer man. Building on this, Luhrmann even creates an inside/outside dichotomy in the moment where the main character stands alone outside while his love is on the balcony with another man. This strongly recalls the moment in Wilde’s poem when the speaker watches his love enter the “house of lust.” The end of the video invokes pacing of the poem as well: the accelerating tempo of the song, the increasingly discordant instrument, and the rapid scene cuts all create a frantic crescendo of emotion and movement until, suddenly, it goes silent. This abrupt transition from a loud din into calm rest mirrors the one that occurs after the speakers love enters the house: one moment, there is shrill laughter and dancing, and the next, only the quiet, frightened dawn.
-A.A.
This image depicts ballerina Carlotta Grisi in the role of Giselle, a ballet dating from the mid-nineteenth century. Wilde’s diction displays an understanding and admiration of dance. In addition, his use of ballet-specific language and tetrameter evoked ballerinas of the mid-nineteenth century, who often moonlighted as prostitutes when not performing. The title of the poem and explicit reference to “dancing” in the first line immediately created this association. In the ballet Giselle, the eponymous protagonist cannot be with the duke she loves and succumbs in a “mad scene.” Many interpret the ballet through a historical and cultural lens. Ballerinas who doubled as prostitutes in the time period are one of many reasons for the spread of syphilis during the time period. Wilde’s diction such as “whirling,” “raced,” and “grotesque” may have its roots in the madness associated with the disease. Dance also appears in the structure of Wilde’s poem. Many basic routines fit into a count of eight. The tetrameter and rhyming couplets aid the sensation of eight in the poem. When not counted in eight, routines are often in threes, such as a waltz. The three lines per stanza and rhymes in the last line of stanzas helps to regulate the three-point rhythm. – KJO
This is a composition by Clint Mansell titled “Lux Aeterna”. Though the name actually means “The Eternal Light”, I personally find it to a bit misleading– this piece is actually quite eerie and morbid. ‘The Harlot’s House” seemed to be a good companion to “Lux Aeterna” because, like the musical piece, the poem effectively conjures up images of darkness, sadness, and mechanics. The unique sense of rhythm present in the poem through both its actual structure and description of dancing can also be heard in Lux Aeterna through the gradual increase in tempo and crescendo. -MG
This is a clip from a Fellini film wherein the protagonist encounters a dancing automaton in a manner very similar to the way in which the ‘lover’ in ‘The Harlot’s House’ is slowly enveloped into the almost static activity of the house. The darkness and morbidity of these scene mirrors the stylistic aura of Wilde’s poem and the almost hyper-real nature of the Fellini scene is very similar to the amalgamation of the ghostly and the real which occurs in Wilde’s poem due to the ethereal nature of the poem. There exists a certain dark, seductive beauty in the clip, which is surely the same effect Wilde conjures in the Harlot’s House.- DF
The above is footage of the tamest dust devils I could find on youtube. The line “the dust is whirling with the dust” immediately recalled, to my mind, a dust devil, in which dust whirls in motion similar to a tornado. Yet Wilde’s line seems much calmer than more intense dust devils (I have inserted a picture of a large dust devil for reference below this). – ER
Baudelaire’s “The Sick Muse” presents a fear so thick that it prevents peace and elevated thought. Words that illustrate a fear as strong as terror inundate the first two stanzas. The first stanza allows fear to creep in, with the words “haunt” and “shadings,” which escalate to “madness and horror.” The second stanza complicates fear with the line “poured on you fear and love out of their urns.” By mixing fear and love, the fear becomes more powerful since “love” evokes such strong emotions. Love tainted by fear makes the love juicy, wretched and tormented, because love in the presence of fear is rarely fulfilling or peaceful. “Pour” entices the reader to visualize fear as a liquid, something tangible that can seep into crannies, or stain, or scald, or drown. After all, this liquid fear is not described as a drink at dinner or a waterfall, but rather as the potion of an imp and succubus, which allegedly haunt sleeping people. This image is immediately followed by the word “nightmare,” which by this point in the poem has an “unruly grip,” suggesting that fear is a prison and a limitation.
The “wretched muse,” is the captive of this prison of fear, but it is also the speaker who is captive, for it is the speaker who “discern[s]” the “madness and horror,” and who fails to be inspired into “health” and “great thoughts” by the muse.
The final line of the second stanza begins with the word “sunk,” a word key to this poem. The first two stanzas, heavy with their descriptions of a terrible, complex fear, sink the muse, the speaker, and the reader.
It is from this depressed viewpoint that the final two tercets can be understood. The speaker “wishes” for the loveliness of “varied sounds of ancient syllables” and “the scent of health.” However, these blissful ideas are above reach from the sunken muse, for they exist in the sky, with Apollo. Therefore, when the poem turns into lighter descriptions, the muse cannot follow along, but rather must watch these wishes from the sunken standpoint. Fear ties the muse down, preventing the actualization of the enticing descriptions of the final two stanzas.
The second two stanzas of “I love the thought…” lend insight into the fear described in “The Sick Muse,” by indicating a possible source of the fear, and emphasizing the difficulty of attaining the loveliness described in the final half of that poem. In the second stanza of “I love the thought…” the speaker describes a poet’s fear as “a chill of hopelessness before this terrible and bleak tableau.” The tableau – the full scene before the speaker – is full of vividly depicted “monstrosities,” “bodies grotesque,” and “poor twisted trunks.” In some ways this stanza is similar to the first stanza of “The Sick Muse,” for both present fear set inside a terrifying world.
The last stanza of “I love the thought…”, like the final two stanzas of “The Sick Muse” present a much more welcoming picture, which is unattainable. In “The Sick Muse,” the lovely daydream is merely a wish; in “I love the thought…” it is a memory. In “I love the thought…”, the “visages gnawed by sores of syphilis…the sickly modern crew…[give] youth their deepest bow.” Youth is the positive contrast with the sickly horrors described in the second stanza. Youth possesses “smooth untroubled brow” and “sweet vitality.” However, one cannot reverse time and return to youth, so the speaker, making note of youth’s beauty from the standpoint of the second stanza’s squalor, cannot actualize that loveliness any more than can the wishing speaker in “The Sick Muse.”
Understood in light of certain aspects of “I love the thought…”, the imprisoning, limiting fear depicted in “The Sick Muse” is the passage of time, the loss of youth, and the completeness of the horrors that arise in life. -YG
You can find the text of the poem by clickinghere.
General info:
Wilde’s poem “The Harlot’s House” first appeared in the Dramatic Review of April 11, 1885. It was probably composed in Spring 1883 at the Hotel Voltaire in Paris (according to Robert Sherard in Oscar Wilde: Story of an Unhappy Friendship). It was reprinted in Poems (1908) and also published by the avant-garde and erotica publisher Leonard Smithers (masquerading as The Mathurin Press) in 1904, illustrated by English artist Althea Gyles (see Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters, p. 1174 n.1).
Poem’s style—meter, rhyme etc.:
Very regular iambic tetrameter (four feet): v- v- v- v
12 stanzas, 3 lines each (total 36 lines)
The first two lines are a couplet, and the third rhymes with the last line of the next stanza.
Doesn’t seem to correspond to a classical poetic type of poem—nearest seems to be the triolet (medieval French poetic form).
Richard Ellmann’s biography—mentions the poem on pp. 218, 253, 478 (not in the index).
Complete Letters, p. 257, letter to Edwin Palmer (the editor of the Dramatic Review), n.d. [March-April 1885]:
In this letter, it appears that Wilde has received a check for his article on Shakespeare and offers to send a poem as well, but he also stipulates that if Palmer takes the poem, he better not include any other poem in the same issue, and that the poem be printed “across a page” (no “column line” style). Wilde writes:
“If you would like a poem I will send you one, but I would ask you not to include any other poem in the number in which it appears, particularly no parody of any other poet. Parodies are a legitimate form of art—and those in your paper I think exceedingly clever—but the art that appeals to laughter and the art that appeals to beauty are different things. Also a poem should be printed across a page: there should be no column line. So you see there are difficulties. Write to me how you propose to print it.
Yours very truly
Oscar Wilde
PS: The poem is in twelve stanzas of three lines each. It is called ‘The Harlot’s House’.”
(This post was written by a Stanford student–A.A.)
In “Ill Fortune,” one of the Les Fleurs du Mal poems, Baudelaire laments the brevity of time and drudgery of life, but also uses the poetic form of a sonnet to make a larger aesthetic point.
From the very first stanza, he sets up a central conflict: “Time is fleeting, and Art is so long!” With this exclamation, Baudelaire introduces the contrast between the rhythmic, dull progression of time through ordinary life – conceived of as his “funeral march to the grave” – and the counteracting effects of Art. Only Art, he suggests, can alleviate the tedium of life. However, the way in which portrays this contrast between Art and life is perhaps more interesting than the contrast itself.
Baudelaire structures “Ill Fortune” as a Petrarchan sonnet: it can be essentially divided into two main sections. The first section, an octave, consists of the first eight lines and traditionally acts as the space in which a problem, conflict, or tension is introduced. In this case, of course, Baudelaire’s problem is the issue of enduring the weight of the world and the dullness of ordinary life. The second section of the poem, a sestet, consists of six lines and traditionally comes after a volta, or “turn,” that seeks to resolve the issue presented in the first half of the poem. It breaks the tension of the preceding lines, signals a change in tone, and offers resolution to the conflict. In Baudelaire’s case, however, the turn from the octave into the sestet does not give readers this obvious, definitive resolution. Instead, it maintains what is at first a perplexingly ambiguous tone until the end of the poem.
Baudelaire signals the turn with a dash before beginning the sestet. What follows, however, offers equivocal comfort to tedium problem presented in the beginning. Take, for instance, these lines:
“—But sleeping lies many a gem
In dark, unfathomed caves,
Far from the probes of men”
It would seem that the beauty of “gems” and the existence of “dark, unfathomed caves” offers the respite the poet is searching for. But what does it mean that these things, these Romantic places and visions, lie “far from the probes of men”? It would appear that the respite from tedium, the artistic salvation of man’s dull life, is actually unreachable. The gems lie undisturbed, the caves are far from men, and, in the following stanza, flowers “waste” away in “desert solitudes.” A note of despair, then, colors these lines. Baudelaire yearns for the Beauty of these visions, but cannot actually see them. Nor, he suggests, can any man.
The fact, however, that these lines are placed after the sonnet’s turn, suggests Baudelaire’s point goes deeper than this. In a traditional Petrarchan sonnet, these lines are located where the poet would normally offer a resolution to his initial conflict. As such, they deserve a second look through that lens.
Upon closer this examination, a reader can realize that, in a way, Baudelaire has gained accessed these places of Beauty – but through poetic imagination and Art rather than through ordinary life. The poem, in its capacity as a poem, enables him, and us, to imagine the deep caves and wasting flowers that are not directly perceivable by man. In fact, the poetic representation of these items is perhaps more powerful by virtue of the fact that they cannot be accessed in any other way. A traveler of the world, for instance, could not easily reach down into unfathomable caves or explore the places of nature inaccessible by men. The poet’s mind, however, can absolutely conceive of these places. Thus, Baudelaire’s poem is a testament to the power of Art and the poetic imagination over that of reality.
The pervasive sense of melancholy that resounds in Baudelaire’s ‘L’ennemi’ is inextricably linked with a corresponding fascination with the impermanence and fragility of Man, encapsulated by the tonal bleakness of ”Le temps mange la vie”, suggestive of a continual cycle wherein Man is unable to ever free himself from the bonds of Time, crucially inhuman in its scope. In turn, it could be argued that this morose acceptance of the supposed ‘state’ of Man results in the desire to make ‘one desperate effort to see and touch’, as Pater states in his ‘Studies in the History of the Renaissance’ , as there is a constancy to the reminders that we will fade into ‘l’automne des idées’- ‘the autumn/fall of ideas’, an internal repetition mirrored in the simplistic ABAB rhyme scheme of the poem, where the final word in French is often traditionally melancholy i.e tombeaux, orage, ravage.
As well as this, the direct contrast between stanzas of the ‘ténébreux orage’ of childhood, indicative of a naivety and activity immediately removed by the sedate rhythm and the ‘pelle et les râteaux’ (rakes and spades) of adulthood, seem to mirror the fundamental concept of the ‘interval’ in Pater’s work. If we are to examine Baudelaire as hyper-aware of his place in the world as a human being, then it is clear that the ‘douleur’ to which he refers stems from his ability to recognise the titular obscure ennemi. Here, I would argue is a crucial paradox in this extract from Baudelaire’s work; that he is clearly able to identify the enemy which ‘nous ronge le coeur’ ( here note the universality of the ‘nous’ ) yet wishes to obscure it from the depths of his imagination, possibly indicated by the position of ‘obscur’ directly before the noun of ‘ennemi’. It follows that the hedonistic and controversial tendencies often ascribed to Baudelaire could have stemmed partially out of fear of his own mortality, contextually fitting into Pater’s theory that the endgame of human existence is ‘getting as many pulsations as possible’ into our lives, a desire that cannot exist without the conscious knowledge of an end to the game, so to speak.
I would in fact argue that this poem also forms a major part of Baudelaire’s moral philosophy due to the explicitly stated desire to find the ‘mystique aliment’ = ‘mystical food/nutrition’ that will allow his ideas to transcend conventionally held notions of power and conviction. The use of ‘food/nutrition’ indicates a necessity to this pursuit, and so we see that this need to conquer impermanence is itself a physical and emotional struggle which leads to melancholy, with the readers bearing witness to the metaphorical envelopment of the poem by the ‘Ennemi’, capitalised for additional power and reponsible for the breakdown in fluidity of the final stanza- prevalence of punctuation, especially when considered in light of the traditional fluidity of a sonnet.
And so, of course, it is through impermanence’s consumption that we gain this characteristic melancholy seen in Baudelaire’s work, as in my mind, the true sadness of human existence seen in this poem is that idea that ‘When I was young’ = ‘Ma jeunesse..fut’ is known to humanity, that the past, death and the end exist as pure definites, and so our only recourse is to seek to imbue our lives with as many definite instances of pleasure as possible. Hopefully, both Pater and Baudelaire would agree that getting the ‘highest quality to your moments’ is dependent on an awareness of the ‘awful brevity’ of life.
(This post was written by a Stanford student, L.H.)
First of all, I will post the translation (by Richard Howard) that I used for the purpose of this poem, as it differs significantly from the one examined in class.
Beauty
Conceive me as a dream of stone:
my breast, where mortals come to grief,
is made to prompt all poets’ love,
mute and noble as matter itself.
With snow for flesh, with ice for heart,
I sit on high, an unguessed sphinx
begirding acts that alter forms;
I never laugh–and never weep.
In studious awe the poets brood
before my monumental pose
aped from the proudest pedestal,
and to bind these docile lovers fast
I freeze the world in a perfect mirror:
the timeless light of my wide eyes.
To speak of beauty, to discuss its features and attributes, to judge which things do and do not fall under its aegis, is an activity that requires no great perspicatiousness. Many have done it without saying anything new or interesting, many will continue to do so.
To speak for beauty, on the other hand–to inhabit its personified (even deified) form and make bold declarations from its very lips–this is an endeavor that cannot but belie profound fascination, deep meditation, and daring imagination on the part of the speaker.
One cannot but be overwhelmed by the influence of these three features on the poem “Beauty”, part of Charles Baudelaire’s anthology Les Fleurs du Mal. This poem is full insights and observations made from the point of view of “Beauty” itself, which is characterized as a proud ice queen, majesterially surveying her domain with a cold, indifferent gaze. The language of the verse reinforces this image by means of its rigid sonnet form, classic and unyielding, and the nouns that are embedded into the body of the poem at reguar intervals drive home the point with their rich connotative physicality. Examples of such words include “stone”, “snow”, “ice”, “freeze”, “pedestal”, and “mirror”; they anchor the poem to its main theme with their uncompromising hardness. In addition to her cold flintiness, Beauty is also mysterious: she is compared to an “unguessed sphinx”, as unreadable as a “dream of stone”. Poets may kneel all they want before her high throne, but she remains mute and unswayed, such that her poor mortal worshippers eventually “come to grief” at her feet.
Baudelaire’s characterization of beauty, as exemplified in this poem, may have become a common-enough trope in the world of literary ideas, but I am unsure that it is easy to come to terms with its radical subversiveness even today. One learns that Baudelaire’s conception of beauty was innovative, sure enough, but often when one has been told that something was a “great innovation”, its innovativeness is taken for granted and any genuine surprise or shock becomes impossible. But once one sits down to truly consider what Baudelaire has done in this poem, it gradually dawns on one that this new incarnation of “beauty” is a formidable one indeed–distressing, not to mention morbid.
For there exists a universal tendency to synonimize the notion of “good” with that of the “beautiful”. We may think that we have now escaped this temptation, now that it has been some time since plump cherubs and the Blessed Virgin were the de rigueur ways in which beauty manifested itself to the public. That is to say, the most beautiful things (or the things that deserve to be most beautiful) are no longer religious in nature. But even today, we use the term “beauty” to justify certain choices and outcomes, we apply the adjective “beautiful” to indicate superior placement in some particular value system that we possess. The concept of beauty is inextricably tied to some evaluative preference, or even a moral statement. We have always exploited beauty in some way or another, always used it as a means to an end–whether it be the religious aims of yesteryear or the more diverse (advertising, urban development) ones of the present day. But through and through, we’ve never questioned the temperament of beauty itself, never questioned whether it was really as pliant and submissive as we had assumed.
Baudelaire was not an aesthete for nothing: in his view of the world, beauty and aesthetics are not merely subsidiary concepts. Beauty, in fact, is the deiess that governs the world, though most of it is oblivious of this fact–save the poets who pay homage at her shrine. And though he counts himself among the ranks of these worshippers, Baudelaire has a further role to play. He is a sort of tortured prophet for this goddess, who cannot help but write hymnals (take the “Hymn to Beauty”, for example) in her praise all day long. All his work is dedicated to Beauty, but at the same time he is also exceedingly disillusioned with her. It is not a mere lapse of faith that plagues him, it is a crisis that lies at the foundation of his faith: for though Beauty demands worship, she is unmoved by humanity’s strivings and tribulations. To her fervent flock, all that she deigns to give is a reflection, an incandescent illusion produced by the “perfect mirror” of her eyes. And yet it is towards this shimmering mirage that Baudelaire must journey, though he knows in his heart that the vision before him is nothing but a false hope. It is a bitter, cynical prophet that writes here of his queen, yet at the same time he cannot help but be held in thrall by her splendor. He knows he has set himself up to fail: but he can to nothing but precipitate towards his downfall, drawn like a moth to a flame*.
Our first week is over already! Baudelaire was the focus of most of our in-class discussions this week, and you (the Stanford students) had so much to say, and such good things, I might add, that I thought it would be fun to continue our thinking here, if you like. Any and all thoughts and questions on Baudelaire (and any of the other texts we read in conjunction with Baudelaire this week) are very welcome, as short or long as you like. Let’s respond to one another here, too, so this is not just a one-way conversation.
Online visitors, please use the Comments section, and we will read your post and respond to you as well!
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We didn’t get to talk much about “The Wretched Monk” (“Le Mauvais Moine”) in class on Wednesday, but this sonnet is really sweet and sad. It’s a bit different in tone than most of the others we read, except for the similar “The Enemy (“L’Ennemi”). I think about the discussions around remorse and nostalgia we had in class. The soul as a tomb, inescapable, forever, a “sad shrine” that doesn’t have a religious referent. If we had had the time in class, I would have asked you what you make of the last triplet (last stanza), especially the reference to the “labour of my hands, my eyes’ delight.” -petradt
Thoughts on Baudelaire’s “The Wretched Monk,” WildeFranc
The century that preceded Baudelaire brought drastic change—a break from tradition, and our understanding of our place in society. The Catholic Church had been denigrated in Parisian eyes; Monarchs crumbled as the Bourgeoisie rose to power. In the aftermath of all this change, Baudelaire engages modernity head on. Through his series of poems in The Flowers of Evil, we relive his experiences and get a glimpse into Baudelaire’s psyche. With modernity afoot, Baudelaire stumbles, falls and rises through what sometimes appears as a lawless and faithless time— a time that questions all known things, but seems to resolve nothing. A time period, in France in particular, as Walter Pater claimed, which brought an end to the Renaissance and its ideals. The city of Paris, is physically and visually growing and changing as fast as industry permeates its borders. Reading Baudelaire’s poems imprints in our memory these changing moments in history. Through Baudelaire’s words we “see” and “feel” the world as individuals, not influenced by any other governing thought, but only as an impression of a past time.
In The Wretched Monk, for example, we can feel and visualize how Baudelaire observed religion and the city of Paris in that exact moment and time — as Walter Pater states, a moment in our collective memories which is “unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burns and [is] extinguished with our consciousness of [it]…”
Old monasteries under steadfast walls
Displayed tableaux of holy Verity,
Warming the inner men in those cold halls
Against the chill of their austerity
To Baudelaire the great cathedrals of Paris stand as ancient monuments of the past. Monasteries are like museums which display art objects, but need identifying tags which tell us of their past meaning. These holy objects are enshrined in past beliefs that modernity questions and can only vaguely perceive. Within these monasteries we are reminded of salvation, redemption and the promise of eternal happiness — the holy ideal that had governed Parisian thought in previous centuries. To Baudelaire these symbols are cold, lifeless – emblematic of grand repression, and isolation from reality. To the modern world of Baudelaire, old Catholic dogma is nothing more than obscure faith, which leaves one cold in its prodigious promises.
Those times, when seeds of Christ would thrive and grow,
More than one monk, now in obscurity,
Taking the graveyard as his studio
Ennobled Death, in all simplicity.
Religion, which once flowered, giving strength and power, had become a rare and dead dream. Its dedicated servants are in limbo and pray to an abandoning god who promises only a quiet, lifeless existence and death. The monk is a “solitary prisoner” of a bygone era.
— My soul’s a tomb that, wretched cenobite,
I travel in throughout eternity;
Nothing adorns the wall of this sad shrine.
Abandoned by God is the devout monk who dwells in these deserted tombs.
O slothful monk! Oh, when may I assign
This living spectacle of misery
To labour of my hands, my eye’s delight?
Baudelaire yearns to live — to see and touch life, which is fleeting and quickly burning away before him. The great beauty of these religious shrines bedazzles him, but they inspire no movement, no thrust forward. That which once held the power to assuage pain, to heal a wounded soul, forever eludes his grasp.
Perhaps Walter Pater’s observations in his Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance best reflect these moments: we live life in opposing intervals, sad/happy, “listless…/high passion,” etc. The wiser of us will spend our thoughts in “art and song,” but to the Poet — “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has…” from Pater’s perspective, the highest quality of life. A poet transfers his visual experience of the world into words, which evoke thought and feeling in his/her readers. The words become symbols of life. We live, we love (if we’re lucky), we die. Baudelaire reminds us of the beauty in all life and the emotions, which it stirs in us. As in Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “this stormy life [gives us] neither inward peace nor outward repose.” Life is a gem to be enjoyed while we can. Baudelaire cautions his reader not to be “ a wretched monk.” The austerity and coldness of such a “slothful” life is nothing compared to a life spent in labor, love and delight in life itself. WildeFranc
(This post was written by a Stanford student- CAN.)
In his poem Correspondances, Baudelaire depicts Nature as a majestic but indecipherable force, which only the poet, through both horizontal and vertical “correspondences” or synesthesias, can reveal and translate to the human world, and thus deliver to human understanding.
In the first stanza, Baudelaire sets up Nature to be both majestic and impenetrable. The metaphor “La Nature est un temple”, Nature is a temple, announces the religious undertone of the poem, and shows, from the very beginning, the poet’s desire to reveal nature to man through analogies and comparisons. Trees, similarly, become “de vivants piliers”. This oxymoronic expression suggests that trees are equally part of the religious edifice that the poem depicts, to cater to human understanding. This metaphor is interesting for several reasons. First, the trees are personified as leaving “de confuses paroles”, confusing speech. One could imagine that this voice, this speech which Baudelaire alludes to, is that of a priest or religious intermediary, thus making the trees be the connection between heaven and earth, just as they connect the ground and the sky through their roots and their branches—creating a vertical movement, a vertical correspondence. The trees would therefore become one of Man’s first points of contact and understanding of Nature, in an otherwise obscure environment.
Baudelaire indeed emphasizes the idea of confusion through his diction : “confuses paroles”, “ forêts de symboles”, “confondent”, “ténébreuse”, “profonde”, and “nuit” (confusing speech, groves of symbols, shadowy, profound, night) are all terms that connote a lack of clarity and understanding. On the other hand, Nature is observing the passers-by with “des regards familiers”—familiar looks. The fact that the stanza, which is all about confusion and the barrier which separates Man from a real understanding of Nature, ends with the word “familier” introduces the notion that this poem is in fact about bringing understanding to mankind—and that the poet himself is the intermediary, the vehicle of this understanding.
The structure of the poem, which is a Sonnet, is particularly adapted to this didactic purpose. Indeed, it seems as though Baudelaire sets up the two first quatrains to reveal the nature of the problem, and the two tercets to be the answer, the explanation, the key to Man’s understanding. The second stanza is full of imagery, which already announces the poet’s desire to bring understanding through form, style, and mastery of language. Indeed, the first line’s meaning and content “Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent”, is emphasized by its style and form : the “échos” which the poet refers to are found in the repetition of the “k”, “l”, and “d” sounds from “Comme” , “de”, and “longs” to “qui”, “de” and “loin”. The next two lines seem to form a transition from the problem to the solution: the antithesis “ténébreuse (…) unité” and the opposition between “la nuit” and “la clarté”, night and clarity, indicates a progression from confusion to understanding, from and opacity to transparency. Finally, the last line of this second quatrain reveals the poet’s motus operandi : “Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent.” This perfectly dosed alexandrine line is written in iambic tetrameter, thus introducing three of the ways through which the poet intends on revealing and translating Nature to mankind: through “perfumes”(the sense of smell), through “colours” (the sense of sight), and through “sounds”, (the sense of hearing), and by making these all “correspond.” In French, the end of the line is somewhat even stronger, as it ends in the reflective action verb “se répondent”. The fact that the verb is reflexive, adds to the idea of entanglement of the senses—they are inextricably linked, and you cannot evoke one without being hit back by the other.
The poet then proceeds with his didactic purpose: he uses a series of comparisons invoking the senses he just mentioned, to explain elements of Nature. In the first line of the third stanza, he compares “des parfums frais” with “des chairs d’enfant”. As such, the sense of smell (“parfums”) and touch (“frais”) are both invoked to make sense of the “chairs d’enfants”, the baby’s skin. What is more, the “haubtois” (oboes) are said to be “doux”(soft), thus linking the sense of hearing to the sense of touch, and the “prairies” are “verts” (green), thus linking the sense of vision associated with the color green to a sense of smell and touch associated with the word “prairie”. These “horizontal synesthesias”, which link elements of the human world, are the tools which the Poet has at his disposal, in order for the average Man to make sense of the Natural World. As such, the Poet becomes a sort of prophet, a guide, between the supernatural or sublime, and every day life. One can argue that this poem is therefore also revealing of Baudelaire’s implicit point of view on the status and role of the poet, just as Mallarmé reveals his thoughts on the Poet’s function in his Vers en Crise.
The images in this third stanza all connote a sense of purity and innocence, and seem to introduce a tinge of nostalgia to the poem, what with the presence of the baby’s skin, the mellowness which describes the oboes, and the color green. However, Baudelaire marks his will to branch away from these with the sharp punctuation “—”, which he places at the beginning of the last line of the stanza, for emphasis. This formal break with the rest of the stanza is then mirrored in the content of the last line which announces “d’autres, corrompus, riches, et triomphants”—others, corrupted, rich, triumphant,full. Both the word “others” and the meaning of the adjectives which ensue, serve to distinguish what is to follow from the serenity and peace which pervaded from the images he just conjured.
The final line of the stanza is once more in iambic tetrameter, and introduces three caracteristics: “corrompus, riches, et triomphants”, which one can associate to the nouns he introduces with the linking comparison “Comme”: “l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin, et l’encens.” The association is also present through the rhyme scheme, as these two lines end with the nasal sound “en” (“triomphant” and “enfants”). Interestingly enough, the comparison remains implicit in the English translation: the connecting “Comme”, which one would expect to see translated as “Like” or “As”, is nowhere to be found, as is the rhyme: the line rhymes with the very last line of the poem in English (“full” and “soul”), as opposed to the line which mentions the plants. However, it is clear from the French version that “L’ambre, le musc et le benjoin”, which are translated as “Musk, ambergris” and “benjamin”, are the opulent yet “corrupted, rich, and triumphant” elements which the poet formerly alluded to. Interestingly enough, these three nouns are all associated with women, which one could argue reflects, in contrast to last stanza’s childhood nostalgia and purity, the adult age. Amber, musk, and benjamin are all fragrances that can be used in perfumes and benjamin, in particular, was typically used as part of oriental perfumes and in cigarette aromas. These three fragrances therefore possess a certain aphrodisiac power, which certainly did not elude Baudelaire when he chose them.
Finally, these fragrances connect with the word “transports” (rapture) in the last line, which connotes a violent movement of passion, and which affects both “l’esprit”, the spirit, and “les sens”, the senses. As such the traditional mind/body dichotomy reaches a sort of harmony by the end of the poem, thanks to the poet’s mastery of language, but also Nature’s powers. The fact that the poem ends on the word “sens” is particularly meaningful as the senses become the key to the whole poem: they are the door through which humans can decipher the natural world, as they are the vehicle through which the poet delivers it to human understanding. It must here be noted that every sense is invoked in the last two lines: the plants, “l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens” , invoke the senses of smell, touch, taste, and vision at once, and all that is missing is the sense of hearing. Conveniently enough, Baudelaire ends the poem with the active verb “chantent”, singing, thus completing the puzzle and ending in a sort of apotheosis of the senses, which one could argue creates a reference to climaxing during the physical act of sex—the ultimate awakening of the senses.
French poet, critic, translator and essayist, among the most influential poets of the 19th century. Later began to write poems in prose, producing some of the earliest important examples of the form. (Oscar Wilde also tried his hadn at these; see “The Artist”)
Powerful approach to unorthodox subjects such as vice, boredom, sexuality, depravity, and unique reshaping of such classical poetic subjects as beauty, the poetic muse, or the poet’s role, formed foundation of Symbolism and Decadence, and still made itself felt in styles and themes of early Modernism
Some biographical milestones: born in Paris, where he spent most of his life (and became a poet of the city); difficult relationship with unsympathetic stepfather; briefly attended law school but dropped out; increasingly dissipated lifestyle (not even long sea voyage to the Indian Ocean his family sent him on in 1841 changed his ways). 1842 received inheritance, started to live the life of a Parisian dandy squandering his money, drinking excessively, experimenting with drugs, and writing poetry. Contracted syphilis, accumulated debts, difficulties with publishers and printers, forever moving. His family assigned him financial guardian in 1844. After the remainder of his father’s money was put into a trust, Baudelaire found himself forced to seek a means of earning additional income, and his literary career took off—he wrote critical essays, art criticism and poetry.
In addition to his works of poetry and criticism, Baudelaire also authored a short novel, La fanfarlo, which was based largely on his experiences as a young artist living in Paris.
Love life: liaison with mixed-race mistress Jeanne Duval, to whom he was devoted over many years. Many of his poems were inspired by her. Two other mistresses also inspired poems (Mme Sabatier, and the actress Marie Daubrun).
1847: discovered Edgar Allan Poe, became a chief translator and literary advocate; powerful influence on Baudelaire’s own emerging aesthetic theories.
During this time, Baudelaire also discovered the ideas of Joseph de Maistre, from which he adopted his philosophy of providentialism and belief in original sin and evil (background for Les Fleurs du Mal, published 1857)
1861 applied unsuccessfully for admission to the Académie Française. 1864 moved to Belgium, was paralyzed in 1866. Brought back to Paris, where he died on August 31, 1867.
LES FLEURS DU MAL
Les Fleurs du mal (1857; Eng. tr., Flowers of Evil, 1909—Oscar Wilde would only have read this in French!) collected many of Baudelaire’s previously published poems; originally to be titled The Lesbians (even though it only contained three lesbian-themed poems: “Lesbos” and two “Condemned Women” poems). In this landmark work, Baudelaire brought together many of his previous poems, many of which had already been previously published. Jonathan Culler (introduction to our edition) says that Baudelaire conceived of lesbian love as never satisfied, always burning, and therefore as torture (idea that without a man there cannot be fulfillment…), and saw Sappho [with Ovid] as a tragic figure; hence for Baudelaire, “the lesbians would have been the central and representative figures for a book of poems about the impossible structure of desire, its diverse dramas, and the poet’s relation to infinite longings.” (This is a debatable, problematic interpretation, of course.)
Les fleurs du mal created an immediate scandal because of its frank sexuality, conflicted or spirituality, and confrontational, blatantly immoral (or amoral) attitudes à public trial for obscenity and blasphemy in Paris; both Baudelaire and his publisher convicted and fined on morality charges, ordered suppression of six of the originally 100 poems, still banned in France until 1949: “Lesbos”, “Women Doomed,” “Lethe”, “To Her Who Is Too Gay,” “The Jewels,” “The Vampire’s Metamorphoses.”
Reissued twice (without those poems) in the 1860s, however; secured Baudelaire’s reputation as one of the most daring poets of his generation. Complex publication history: The second edition (1861) added more than 35 new poems (but didn’t restore the censored ones which remained banned until 1949 (!); the posthumous edition of 1868 added more than 25.
The initial publication was arranged in six thematically segregated sections:
You can find the excerpt from “Crisis in Poetry” (translated by Mary Ann Caws) online here.
Here are some thinking questions for the excerpt. Feel free to comment on them (Stanford students: in blue right below the questions here; online visitors: in the comment section below).
1. The essay from which this excerpt is taken is called “Crisis in Poetry,” so its subject is a difficult situation poetry finds itself in at the time. Part of the background to this crisis is Mallarmé’s observation that although there are many languages, “the supreme one is lacking.” In your opinion, what implications might this basic observation have for poetry–the way poetry functions as a specific mode of communication with others, for examples, but also the way the poet conceives of a poem before or as s/he is writing it? And why could that be a problem for Mallarmé, the “master” poet of Symbolism?
From a reader’s perspective Mallarmé’s statement that languages are imperfect and that “the supreme one is lacking” is intellectually conceivable and notable in everyday language and in especially in poetry. Through my reading of Baudelaire’s “Hymm to Beauty,” for example, in my mind as I read the English translation I knew that language translations are onerous — a task which never truly relays the original unique emotionality or the psychological impact of the original. A literal translation renders a fractured incoherent verse, which yields nothingness. I studied the words in context to the entire poem as best I could. I had a friend on mine read the original French version to me so that I could “feel” and “see” shapes and motion in my minds eye. In the end, my thoughts and feelings were different, yet similar to the translated version on the opposite page. The uniqueness of the “word,” is not in its meaning but rather in its sound and shape. WildeFranc
The quest for the ideal language, that is to say, the research for the allegedly lost Adamic or Divine language has always been a great concern for philosophers and poets. Although the idea according to which one could find some sort of ultimate language that would match the signified (mental image, the concept) with its signifier (acoustic image, the word) and vice versa may seem to be illusory; it might nonetheless be argued that some specific literary devices may help us overcoming the finiteness of languages. The might of the metonymy, the metaphor, and the allegory largely used in symbolic poetry constrain the linguistic sign to transcend and self-other (se faire autre). In this latter case, the semantic prevails over the syntax. These peculiar literary devices implement what one could call transfiguration and reification, namely, they turn these dead words written on paper into some sort of alive poetic discourse. -R.C.
I like the idea of self-othering here, and it’s interesting also to note your ideas of matching signifier/signified and overcoming finiteness, RC. What’s at stake seems a) transformation, and b) mastering a barrier. Plato and mimesis are always in the background here (not to mention Jacques Derrida’s “Double Séance”; Mallarmé was an important touchstone for Derrida). We’ll talk about mimesis (the Platonic tradition of the problem and its relation to literature of the 19th century) in class soon; it’s central to an understanding of Symbolism and Decadence. Ask me about it in class soon 🙂 Thanks for prompting these thoughts! -petradt
Especially in relation to the symbolic nature of real-world elements, there is no “supreme” language. What different elements represent or mean might have some degree of universality within a culture, but between individuals, interpretations can be vastly different. This makes it more difficult to communicate, especially through poetry, as is perhaps part of Mallarmé’s quandary. The struggle for the poet trying to communicate using symbolic language is to deliver the intended message without sacrificing the desired aesthetic. -M.P.
2. Mallarmé says that “[t]he pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as a speaker, yielding his initiative to words …” What does this mean for the role of the poet here, especially when you compare it, say, to the preceding Romantic tradition in which the poet was often seen as a prophet-like figure?
I would say that Mallarmé is less interested in the word – its meaning – than the sound or the shape it has; in this he is miles away from the Romantic tradition. WildeFranc
That’s a really interesting observation, WildeFranc: that the aesthetic and perceptive effect is in the spotlight here, rather than the meaning. In a way, this idea thinks of words more two-dimensional, horizontal or flat, i.e. more surface- rather than depth-oriented. What does this imply for the functions of poetry? Does it become purely decorative then? We need to think about this more. Thanks for bringing it up. -petradt
3. Look at the metaphor of words as fireworks in that same paragraph. What do you make of that?
I think it’s a beautiful image with too many different facets to even begin to comment on them all. But here’s a preliminary stab at a few of them. I think it’s probably important that he chose a complicated object like fireworks to stand in for words. Fireworks are a human invention, we mix them and make them into whatever color and shape we please, yet all of their ingredients are fundamentally natural chemical elements and compounds which we find in and which constitute the world around us. We manipulate them, but we are also made of them. We use fireworks as a celebration of life. We send them up in moments of ecstatic joy and they then heighten the joy within us. They are an ostentatious display, of course, but breathtakingly beautiful. They make us happy. Furthermore, they are ephemeral–they exist as light and sound for moments only, then as smoke-ghosts for moments longer, before they are gone. The spoken word is the same. The written word thankfully has more permanence, but spoken poetry (which he may have meant, since he references “perceptible breath”) and fireworks seem to have much in common. However, there is another association being made. We do not watch the fireworks, we watch their reflections in a jewel. Jewels refract and reflect light across all their facets, making a show perhaps more brilliant than the fireworks themselves, but also robbing us of the fireworks in truth–we have a substitute image. Maybe a symbol? It seems a plausible interpretation to assign the role of poetry to the jewel, leaving fireworks to be not words but the realms of truth which can be described only indirectly. We cannot see them, but we can see–and describe, and appreciate–their reflections. -LN
That’s a great “preliminary stab” at the fireworks metaphor here, LN. Did you notice what happens to the agency here? The words light up because of the “shock of their difference,” animated by something that seems inherent in them, not arranged by the poet. There is no fireworks engineer behind this. What does this mean for the role of the poet here? And if the words do so beautifully on their own, what’s the “crisis”? You call the words/fireworks “smoke-ghosts” … what a beautiful phrase! Love it. -petradt
I think Mallarmé sees words as fireworks bursting, igniting the page. His job as poet is to “direct” them as a painter would choose his colors. WildeFranc
4. What might Mallarmé mean by the “absent” flower in the bouquet at the end of the excerpt? How does that relate to or complement the idea of the disappearance of the poet as a speaker?
I see the absent flower as the ideal, the sublime, something that mere language–flawed and incomplete as it is–cannot grant us access to. More specifically, though one may labor long and hard at providing a comprehensive description of a bouquet, the final product will merely be a collection of words, which has nothing to with the experience (not limited to sensory, though in what way I couldn’t possibly explain), the physicality of the bouquet itself. The best way to get at the essence of something is perhaps not through description, but by suggestion (or symbolization)…? -LH
You’ve started grappling with a very important collection of concepts here, LH: experience, physicality, essence. We will need to think about all this more; thanks for bringing it up. I also wonder if there is an implicit value judgment inherent in this passage in Mallarmé: does the “absent” flower in the bouquet seem like a better one than the ones that are physically present? And if so, what does that image imply if we transpose the image back on to words and poetry? -petradt
In all art, the absent (negative space) is important; one could argue that the negative is just as important as the positive space. A painting, a poem, a musical composition is as notable for what is not there as what is there. And a true work of art rises above its origin, above its creator. In this, it complements the idea of disappearance of the poet as speaker. Through use of poetic features such as onomatopoeia, rhythm, dissonance, and the like, poetry becomes accessible beyond national boundaries. A word, a phrase, can become the embodiment of the thing, e.g. the sibilance of hiss and slither can bring to mind a snake or something serpentine, even if we do not know the meaning of the words. How words are arranged on the page can also give us a clue as to meaning. WildeFranc
On Wednesday, 9/26, we will be studying Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal in our Stanford class, focusing on the following poems, a brief excerpt from Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Poetry” (Crise de vers), and on Exercise #1 (find it under the “Exercises” category in the sidebar):
“’I love the thought …’” (pp. 18-21), “The Sick Muse” (24 f.), “The Venal Muse” (26 f.), “The Wretched Monk” (26-29), “The Enemy” (28 f.), “Ill Fortune” (28-31), “A Former Life” (30 f.), “Beauty” (38 f.), “The Ideal” (38-41), “The Giantess” (40 f.), “Hymn to Beauty” (44 f.)
(Note: The page numbers refer to our in-class edition (Oxford World Classics, see under “Schedule of Readings” in the sidebar menu.)
Here are a few useful links for Charles Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du Mal:
Oscar Wilde and the French Decadents 