[Janet Kenny]

Baudelaire

Janet

[peter richards]

Sudden interest?

[Julie Steiner]

At the end, he couldn't even say his own name, although some contend he could still murmur "merde."

This isn't as bad as it sounds. Poets can survive for quite some time without saying our own names. Without uttering profanities, though...hmmm...

[Quincy Lehr]

It might be worthy of note that much of Baudelaire's work, were it to be run through a contemporary workshop, would probably be lambasted for being "overwritten." Which is not so much to bash workshops as to wonder if something more general in poetic culture has fettered our ambitions.

[Wendy Sloan]

Re Quincy's point:

Maybe several things happening.

One of them, I think, is that we were involved in a strong reaction (and aversion) to the 19th Century throughout the 20th (hence modernism). Maybe we have enough distance now to begin to appreciate 19th Century style.

[Quincy Lehr]

Wendy--

I wonder if Modernism's the culprit. Somehow I doubt it, in that the charter generation, most notably Pound, were capable of some pretty high-flown rhetoric. To wit, from Canto 14 (rendered flush-left by my laziness):

"The slough of unamiable liars,
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority,
pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,
obscuring the texts with philology,
hiding them under their persons,
the air without refuge of silence,
the drift of lice, teething,
and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers."

God, I love Pound. Point is, I think it's a bit later.

Quincy

[Julie Steiner]

"These are a few of my favorite things..."

[David Landrum]

If Baudelaire had only written "Cats," his fame as a poet would be established. Benjamin's image of the poet, an "albatross described in one of Baudelaire's most famous poems who is brought down to the deck of a ship and drags his great wings there while vicious and stupid sailors torment him," is from the sonnet "The Albatross," which has been translated brilliantly by Richard Wilbur. It's up at my office (I'm at home) but I'll post it in a couple days.

[Mark Allinson]

It might be worthy of note that much of Baudelaire's work, were it to be run through a contemporary workshop, would probably be lambasted for being "overwritten."


That's true, Quincy, we really only have the "plain style" to work with these days. Listen to the shrieks of outrage on the board if you try an elevated rhetorical style. Only the low style of conversational speech is allowed today.

The origins of this rule of the low style lie in the leveling desire of Left-wing English Romanticism, to return language to that of "the common man." The present Left also insist on the maintenance of this style for the same political reasons - the elevated style smacks of elitism.

But throughout most of its history, poetry (like prose) had a range of styles to choose from. As Kenneth Burke paraphrases Cicero: "the plain style is best for teaching, the tempered style for pleasing, and the ornate (grandiloquent) style for moving".

Forays into the realm of "the tempered style" are about as far as we can go at present. But I have no doubt that the "ornate (grandiloquent) style" (last practiced by the late Victorians) will make a comeback one day.

[Wendy Sloan]

Oh, I hardly think you can blame it on "Left Wing English Romanticism". Who are we talking about here: Shelley? Keats? John Clare? Byron? The American romantic -- Poe? All wrote in a style every bit as "overwritten" as Baudelaire's, to my ear. I can't think of a single English Romantic poet who wrote in a plain style.

No, I think this is a modernist trend that started even in the 19th Century with writers like Walt Whitman, for example (a populist, but not a leftist). Quincy, maybe the early modernists were still pretty florid but started a trend that just got away from them -- the revolution ate its own children -- and by the 1970's nothing but a very plain style was acceptable. Even rap lyrics are more decorative than a lot of the academic poetry of the past 30 years. But Eliot & Pound were -- achem -- hardly leftists.