LEO BERSANI
his
use of prosaic language: while they often work in opposite direc–
tions in a single poem (the one deflating what the other inflates),
they both violently upset that naturalistic seriousness which romantic
eloquence was very rarely willing to forego. Eliot recognized some–
thing artificial in Baudelaire's suffering and he spoke of Baudelaire's
confusion of evil with its theatrical representations, the "theater"
being the "Byronic paternity and Satanic fraternity" behind many
of his poems. But this paraphernalia is, for Eliot, "redeemed by
meaning something else";
Baudelaire has, finally, a "fundamental
sincerity" which Eliot defines as his concern "with the real problem
of good and evil." Understandably, Eliot preferred the man to the
poet; it's easier for him to admire Baudelaire's remark that civiliza–
tion consists in "the diminution of the traces of original sin" than to
find anything in his poetry that expresses such a message in unam–
biguously sincere - and poetically successful - terms. For evil and
suffering in Baudelaire's poems may
not
be serious, although the moral
duplicities which Sartre finds (rightly, I think) more characteristic
of Baudelaire's life than the sincerity Eliot praised is perhaps the
source of Baudelaire's strength as a poet. We might even say that in
Les Fleurs du mal,
a certain frivolity is perhaps the most serious
Baudelairean note. On the one hand, unauthenticity can perhaps be
considered as an aesthetic category as well as an ethical one; and in
that case it may mean nothing more than a refusal to impose certain
forms of censorship (deriving, say, from notions of psychological
probability or of taste) on verbal play. But while Baudelaire pulls out
all the stops in letting his melodramatic imagination transform internal
and external reality into a single allegorical scene (by the third
stanza the poet no longer perceives any difference between his mind
and the world), he also manages to suggest some detachment from
the often tasteless artifices (Hope knocking its head against rotten
ceilings, Anguish pounding its flag into his head) which melodrama–
tize his despair. We are encouraged to see some self-mockery in these
excesses by the sophisticated, highly controlled contexts in which they
occur. The elaborate single-sentence structure of the first four stanzas
of the poem quoted, designed to get the maximum shock-effect from
the contrast between the silence or near-silence of stanzas 1-3 and
the sudden, nerve-shattering clanging of bells in line 13, precludes
any sense of the macabre as a "natural" expression of feeling. That
