The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire: with an Introductory Preface by James HunekerBaudelaire, Charles
General
The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire: with an Introductory Preface by James Huneker
Baudelaire, Charles
French poetry -- Translations into English; Prose poems
George Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and
Baudelaire: "Both authors--Poe and De Quincey--fell short of Baudelaire
himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have a
superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperameut and affection
for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror." Poe is without
passion, except a passion for the macabre; what Huysmans calls "The
October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a gulf of despair and
terror and humanity in Baudelaire, which shakes your nerves, yet
stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a poet, he was no
match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The
mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales
extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the
Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the American was more versatile
than his French translator. That Baudelaire said, "Evil be thou my
good," is doubtless true. He proved all things and found them vanity. He
is the poet of original sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of
paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish to us--in his heart he was
a believer. His was "an infinite reverse aspiration," and mixed up with
his pose was a disgust for vice, for life itself. He was the last of the
Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called him the Kamchatka of Romanticism; its
remotest hyperborean peak. Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as
Naturalism; but Baudelaire is alive, and read. His glistening
phosphorescent trail is over French poetry and he is the begetter of a
school:--Verlaine, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud,
Jules Laforgue, Gabriel D'Annunzio, Aubrey Beardsley, Verhaeren, and
many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who
was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be
the obverse of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong
with the world."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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