So you want to write on Les Fleurs du mal… Some notes on reading Baudelaire in the era of Covid

Abstract

It never fails, making each time we arrive at that point in a term where Baudelaire appears on the syllabus a slightly uncanny pedagogical experience, one not entirely unlike that of reading the poems themselves anew. Each time one notices the same, different thing, or the same thing, differently: if there is a poet that the average undergraduate student in a French literature course appreciates, even if for reasons for which they, too, like me, often fumble to find the right frame or articulation or understanding, it is Baudelaire. Whatever the explanation may be, next to Les Fleurs du mal, Les Contemplations generally doesn’t run much chance of ending up among the stack of end-of-term papers (perhaps thereby proving one of Benjamin’s opening points from the Motifs essay: whatever ‘the lyric’ was – its epideictic function or role, perhaps – has undergone an irrevocable cultural change). ‘Why do you want to work on Baudelaire?’, I find myself asking, perhaps somewhat convinced that the earnestness of the question is at least partly due to the fact that, each time, I both am and am not really asking it of them but of myself.