Baudelaire: The Iceberg

Abstract

I had heard that Les Fleurs du mal was one of the most important and influential works of poetry in the last two hundred years, that it was a foundational text of modernity, that it was scandalous, that it was powerful. And so as a sophomore French major in college I eagerly checked it out of the university library, having read only a small handful of poems from it before, the usual ones that often serve as someone’s first inroad to his poetry: ‘Correspondances’ with its vertical and horizontal worlds that seem profound when you’re sixteen, ‘L’Albatross’ and its seemingly transparent lesson about how the world mistreats its poets, also a lesson that teenagers are likely to find appealing. And so, once I had read through all the poems of the collection, my first thought was ‘Really? This?’ Never would I have guessed, if I hadn’t read and been told, that this was the foundational text of modernity. It was not that I just wanted to move on from it, though. While I can’t quite recall exactly how it happened, I was led to find out more, pursued an independent study that my professor wanted to make about the entire history of French poetry but which I convinced him to divide in three equal parts: pre-Baudelaire, Baudelaire, post-Baudelaire. (‘An interesting way of dividing up literary history’, said another professor.) And then, when it came time to choose an undergraduate honours thesis topic, I was a full-on Baudelairean.