A Prose Reverie for Charles Baudelaire

Abstract

As a child of popular culture, it seems fitting that my long-delayed appreciation of Charles Baudelaire began in front of a television screen. Every Halloween since childhood, I ritualistically set myself before the TV to re-watch the first ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episode of The Simpsons, which offers an affectionate parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s sombre poem ‘The Raven’ (1845). Electronic images of the cartoon raven, relentlessly repeating the eerie word ‘Nevermore’, ingrained themselves on my young mind, which was completely oblivious to the show’s overt satire. Astride the bust of Pallas, the raven’s cartoon utterances seemed both strange and beguiling, containing an unsettling symbolism I couldn’t understand. After continual nagging, my parents finally relented and bought me a collection of Poe’s works containing this mysterious narrative. That small, mass-produced edition of Poe’s stories and poems, bound in cheap red cloth, its pages tipped with artificial gold, still sits on my shelf, gathering dust until the darker months, when I routinely re-read my favourites: ‘Ligeia’ (1838), ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842), ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842), and, of course, ‘The Raven’.