Notecards

"Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary."
Khalil Gibran

"The illusion and metaphor of indwelling in the body is so strong that Freud is able to list the body
symbolized as a house among his examples of nearly universal dream and literary symbols in The
Interpretation of Dreams: The human body as a whole is pictured as a house by the phantasy of the
dream, and each individual organ of the body as part of the house. Still, it hardlyseems likely that
Baudelaire could have associated the perfection and beauty of the house in his poem with his own
body."

"In the same way, the poet in Invitation to the Voyage is able to build up the whole world of his
poem from love. It is also interesting, from this viewpoint, that the object of the poet's love is unclear
and the reader cannot tell whether it is his sister, his daughter, his lover, or his own self."

"To traditional forms and traditional themes Baudelaire brought imagery and situations that had
never before existed in French poetry. "Une Charogne" (A Cadaver) provides an excellent example
of how Baudelaire uses Romantic and even classical themes to go beyond them. The poet takes a
walk with his beloved and concludes that, although time passes, his poetry will immortalize her.
Unlike Pierre de Ronsard's poem on that classical theme, "Quand tu seras bien vielle" (When You
Are Very Old), however, Baudelaire's meditation is prompted by a human cadaver whose guts spill
across the page, the poem graphically detailing the flies, vermin, and stink."

"Even in his treatment of Romantic themes, however, Baudelaire is radical for his time. He imagines
solitude not as a state of nature but as it happens in cities, presenting it in counterpoint to city
crowds. The person who experiences ennui, as opposed to mal de sicle, is mercilessly self-aware
and is troubled by original sin and a divided self. For Baudelaire the poet is endowed with special
powers but is also a clumsy albatross ("L'Albatros") or slothful sinner ("Le Mauvais Moine"). No
longer mournful meditation in picturesque settings, introspection turns ugly with Baudelaire, a guilty
pleasure to be squeezed like "une vieille orange" (an old orange), as Baudelaire asserts in "Au
Lecteur." The infinite is no longer the divine perceived in stars; it is found in the expansiveness of
scents, in the imagination, in poetry, in cold-hearted Beauty, in the desire to escape."

"Baudelaire's theory of correspondences and his introduction of such topics as the city and the ugly
side of man's nature to poetry in verse are responsible for the modern quality of Les Fleurs du mal.
Baudelaire also deals with a variety of themes in the Romantic tradition, however, including solitude;
the mal de sicle, which in Baudelaire's terms becomes ennui; the special plight of the poet;
introspection; yearnings for the infinite; and romance. Furthermore, Baudelaire's prosody is
traditional: his alexandrines are no more loosened than those of the Romantics, and he uses a wide
variety of classical forms."

"Baudelaire's ambiguous relationship with the material world and his desire for another world are
evident in his poems about the city of Paris. While some critics, notably Edward Kaplan, have
argued that "Tableaux Parisiens," the section added to the edition of 1861, shows a "conversion to
the real world as it exists," critics such as F."

"Indeed, the subject of Baudelaire's faith has been much debated. The references to God and to
Satan in his poems, letters, and intimate journals have been counted; the validity of his last rites has
been weighed; his confession of faith to Nadar has been examined. Most critics agree that
Baudelaire's preoccupations are fundamentally Christian."

"Baudelaire's complicated experiences with these women and with others undoubtedly shaped his
poetry about them. Some readers view Baudelaire as a mere sensualist and in some poems he
certainly does celebrate the sensuality of women, of scent, and of sensation, but it is important to
note that his poetic descriptions of women are multidimensional."

"In similar fashion, though Baudelaire's legend glossed him as the satanic poet of ennui, sordid
details, and forbidden sensuality, in fact his poetry treats a variety of themes with a range of
perspectives. He does deal with topics that fueled his scandalous reputation."

"Financial constraint, alienation, and complex emotions defined Baudelaire's life, and it is against this
backdrop of complicated family relations that some of the best poetry in the French language was
written. Though Baudelaire's interest in verse was manifest as early as his days in the lyce, his
public emergence as a poet was slow and complicated by many sideline activities through the early
1850s."

"Baudelaire excels in his unprecedented expression of a complex sensibility and of modern themes
within structures of classical rigor and technical artistry. Baudelaire is distinctive in French literature
also in that his skills as a prose writer virtually equal his ability as a poet. His body of work includes a
novella, influential translations of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, highly perceptive criticism of
contemporary art, provocative journal entries, and critical essays on a variety of subjects.
Baudelaire's work has had a tremendous influence on modernism, and his relatively slim production
of poetry in particular has had a significant impact on later poets. More than a talent of nineteenth-
century France, Baudelaire is one of the major figures in the literary history of the world."

"Iambic pentameter is the most common metrical pattern in English, because it follows the natural
rhythm of the way that English is spoken. The original French version of "Hymn to Beauty" is
measured, but it is not as strict about the number of syllables per line or the patterns of stresses in
the words...The geometric versatility of having two pairs of lines per stanza is what makes the
quatrain a popular form. "

"'Hymne la Beaut' (Hymn to Beauty) concludes with the same helpless devotion to Beauty's
powers of distraction and more explicitly articulates Beauty's dual nature: her look is "infernal et
divin" (infernal and divine), and the poet is so addicted that he does not care whether She comes
from Heaven, Hell, or both."

"The power of this inhuman Beauty is terrible. "La Beaut" reduces the poet to a "docile" lover who is
virtually chained to his idol... Baudelaire also wrote poems, such as those dedicated to Beauty, in
which a woman is admired as a hopelessly unattainable object of art."

"Baudelaire's use and mastery of traditional technique revolutionized French poetry by so clearly
representing a unique sensibility"

"The son of Joseph-Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Archimbaut Dufays, Charles Baudelaire was
born in Paris in 1821. Baudelaire's father, who was thirty years older than his mother, died when the
poet was six. Baudelaire was very close with his mother (much of what is known of his later life
comes from the letters he wrote her), but was deeply distressed when she married Major Jacques
Aupick... He experimented with drugs such as hashish and opium... In 1862, Baudelaire began to
suffer nightmares and increasingly bad health. He left Paris for Brussels in 1863 to give a series of
lectures, but suffered from several strokes that resulted in partial paralysis. On August 31, 1867, at
the age of forty-six, Charles Baudelaire died in Paris. Although doctors at the time didn't mention it, it
is likely that syphilis caused his final illness."

"The stormy skies that the poet sees in the addressee's eyes are, of course, stormy emotions of rage
and passion, a common figure of speech. However, much of the poem does not yield to such
superficial interpretation. Indeed, it would be a difficult task to discover every possible meaning that
is contained in the poem's symbols, and not necessarily any would prove entirely useful, since there
is a reason to read the poem in its own allusive form rather than an essay explaining the poem. Nor
is it at all certain that even Baudelaire himself could fully explain the poem, since, as the ancient
Greek philosopher Plato observed, the poet is often powerless to explain his own poetry."

" In the case of a poem like "Hymn to Beauty," there are quite a few traits linking the work to
romanticism. By the 1850s, when the first edition of Baudelaire's book Les Fleurs du Mal went to
press, romanticism had been around for over a half a century, an exhaustively long stretch for a
movement based on spontaneity. His work could be considered romantic if one focuses on its
antecedents, although, like almost all poetry from that time that was worth reading, it was bursting
out of the romantic's norms."

"To start with, the last claim is the most obviously true: that Baudelaire wrote from such an original
perspective that his talent cannot entirely be claimed by any larger movement. This is actually true of
any artist, no matter how much teachers try to use them as examples of what was going on in their
societies."

Redemption
"At the end of the poem, Baudelaire identifies Beauty as a source of redemption in his life. After
openly rejecting traditional values in line 26, when he asks, "Who cares if you're a blessing or a
curse?" he goes on to explain life as being bleak and empty, describing everyday existence as "the
dead hours of this grim universe." In this void, there is only one thing that gives him "light," and that
is Beauty."

"Baudelaire's Invitation to the Voyage is not an easy poem to understand. Its language is symbolic
or allegorical and therefore requires effort beyond ordinary reading to disentangle and interpret. For
instance, the title of the poem talks about a voyage, or, better, a journey. However, a cursory reading
finds no journey ever mentioned in the poem. There is talk about merchant ships in a harbor, but
they do not seem to be connected to any journey that could be the one mentioned in the title."