La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso

Author:Roberto Calasso
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141957821
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Violence of Childhood

For Baudelaire, poetry was not a commando of life, as Rimbaud sometimes seemed to imply. Nor was it something unbreathable, above all for itself, as Mallarmé sometimes seemed to suggest. For Baudelaire, poetry occupied more or less the same place it had always occupied, as for Horace or Racine. Formal innovations did not appeal to him. With him, perhaps for the last time, the Alexandrine was the universal medium. One day, Aleksander Wat showed Czesław Miłosz a poem by Baudelaire along with a sixteenth-century sonnet, without saying who the authors were. ‘It was hard to guess,’ recalled Miłosz. All this does not explain – and makes it more difficult to explain – why his words were a little more penetrating than those of others, more prone to lodge themselves in the meanders of memory, simply by virtue of their power over sensibility, to which we may add – a decisive element, this – that those words came from someone who could say of himself, ‘I have spent my whole life learning how to construct sentences.’

In a passage of his ‘letter of the seer,’ Rimbaud concealed the most perfidious and unexpected objection to Baudelaire: that he supposedly ‘lived in an excessively artistic milieu.’ It was a hint at that spider’s web in which Baudelaire had been entangled all his life, between writing for magazines, cafés, theaters, and ateliers. Something that smothered, poisoned – and maybe it had some relationship with the fact that in Baudelaire, ‘the much lauded form is parochial.’ Because ‘inventing the unknown demands new forms.’ This was the watershed from which the plunge toward the avant-garde was to begin. And the wording chosen by the implacable adolescent judge is so accurate that it’s almost impossible not to be tempted to agree with him. But, at a distance of over a century, Baudelaire’s threadbare and perhaps even a little ‘parochial’ forms have withstood the assault of time far better than that embarrassing poem, ‘Accroupissements,’ which Rimbaud included along with the ‘letter of the seer’ by way of an example of his new poetic practice.

Baudelaire concealed within himself an age-old exhaustion, but his every element was well made. Laforgue instantly recognized this: ‘There is never anything scoundrelly about him, never a false turn to the expressions with which he clothes himself – he is always courteous in the presence of ugliness. He behaves well.’ Rimbaud was driven by an insuppressible, raw energy, but behind him he dragged a dead weight of filth, stridency, the inheritance of a wretched, acrimonious life.

The outworn question of where the gods had wound up was dealt with several times in France after the Revolution, but it never touched, or even came close to, the vibrant tone of Hölderlin and the integral presence of those things called up by his words. In Paris everything tended to take on a cabotin tone. The act about the pagan gods was a part of the other numbers that a poet kept in his repertoire. The opening

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