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PARTISAN REVIEW
its democratic and revolutionary drives; he portrayed everyday life in
the modern world as an heroic adventure, and posited a modern
sensibility as the
sine qua non
for creativity in the arts. At other points
in his life he loathed and denounced everything modern, and de–
manded a rejection of modernity, a total rebellion against it, as the
condition for any authentic life or art. I want to show here how many
of the contradictions in Baudelaire's modernism grow out of his grasp
of real contradictions that permeate the whole of modern material and
spiritual life.
Baudelaire is universally recognized as one of the great urban
writers. In all his writing, the city of Paris plays a principle role in the
spiritual drama. In this, Baudelaire belongs to a great tradition of
Parisian writing that reaches back to Villon, runs through Montes–
quieu and Diderot, Mercier and Restif, and into the nineteenth century
with Balzac and Hugo and Eugene Sue. But Baudelaire also represents
a radical break in this tradition. For he lived and worked in the midst of
the radical transformation of the city itself. His most serious writing
about Paris belongs to the late 1850 and the early 1860s, when, under
the authority of Napoleon
III
and the direction of Baron Haussmann,
the city was being systematically torn apart and rebuilt. Even as
Baudelaire worked in Paris, the work of its modernization was going
on under his feet and around his head. He saw himself not only as a
spectator but as a participant and a protagonist in this ongoing work;
his own Parisian work expresses its drama and trauma. Baudelaire
shows us something that no other writer sees so well : how the
modernization of the city at once inspires and enforces the moderniza–
tion of its citizens' souls.
Two of Baudelaire's late prose poems, "The Eyes of the Poor"
(1864) and "Loss of a Halo" (1865), bring this drama
to
life. These
poems are part of a series that he wrote in the last decade of his life and
planned to bring together under the title of
Spleen de Paris.
Baudelaire
did not live to finish the series or publish it, but he did complete fifty of
these poems, plus a preface and an epilogue, and they appeared as a
unity in 1868, a year after his death. Walter Benjamin, in his series of
remarkable essays on Baudelaire and Paris (now collected and trans–
lated in England as
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of
High Capitalism),
was the first to grasp the great depth and richness of
these prose poems: all my work is in the vein he opened up, though I
have found different elements and compounds from the ones he
brought out. What I have found in these poems is a remarkable
