In addition, dissonant images foreground the operations of language themselves and the problem of sense-making that is so central to the play of modern literature.

Second, Baudelaire is a poet of the city, the first, as Albert Thibaudet wrote, to create a new situation for poetry by taking as the norm life in large cities and the new human relationships and temporality that urban life creates, as men and women pass among people they do not know in settings marked by an ever-changing history.8 In his Salon of 1846 Baudelaire writes that Parisian life is ‘fertile in poetic and marvellous subjects’, and he singles out ‘the spectacle of the elegant world and of the thousands of floating existences which circulate in the subterranean labyrinths of a great city—criminals and prostitutes’—all of whom appear in The Flowers of Evil. But this is not descriptive poetry of the city, glorying in sights and sounds. The section called ‘Parisian Scenes’ would surprise anyone expecting urban descriptions, for it begins with ‘Landscape’, in which the poet, looking out over the roof-tops, claims he will close his shutters and conjure up a world out of his imagination. And when we do get description, it may be something like this:

Meanwhile, corrupting demons of the air

Slowly wake up like men of great affairs.

And, flying, bump our shutters and our eaves.

Against the glimmerings teased by the breeze

Old Prostitution blazes in the streets;

She opens out her nest-of-ants retreat;

Everywhere she clears the secret routes,

A stealthy force preparing for a coup;

She moves within this city made of mud,

A worm who steals from man his daily food.

One hears the hissing kitchens close at hand,

The playhouse screech, the blaring of a band.

The tables at the inns where gamesmen sport

Are full of swindlers, sluts, and all their sort.

Robbers who show no pity to their prey

Get ready for their nightly work-a-day

Of cracking safes and deftly forcing doors,

To live a few days more and dress their whores.

(‘Dusk’)

Poetry of the city, no doubt, but poetry whose most prosaic details (kitchens, safes) seem to have much the same status as the patently unrealistic (the corrupting demons of the air), as though the true subject were the strange realm produced by their intersection. This poetry creates a level of event at which personifications, such as Prostitution, can act along with the demons and the robbers, swindlers, beggars, and other urban types. The low-life figures who parade through the Parisian scenes—sinister old men, broken-down old women, gamblers, criminals, and prostitutes—are figures as much imagined as observed, like the seven appalling and identical creatures of ‘The Seven Old Men’ who, appearing one after another before the speaker, threaten his sanity and cast him loose like a mastless ship on a monstrous sea.

Some of Baudelaire’s greatest poems—’The Swan’, ‘The Little Old Women’, ‘The Seven Old Men’—belong to ‘Parisian Scenes’, but as their narrators wander through the ‘sinuous coils of the old capitals’, the encounters with these grotesque figures become above all struggles over meaning, attempts to understand their mystery. These struggles can produce pleasure—the satisfication of empathy in ‘The Little Old Women’—or melancholy at the oppressiveness of the interpretive process:

Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood

Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,

Old neighbourhoods, are allegorical for me

And my dear memories are heavier than stone.

(‘The Swan’)

or fright at the tenuousness of meaning:

Bedazzled, like a double-visioned drunk,

I staggered home and shut the door, aghast,

Shaking and sick, the spirit feverous,

Struck by this mystery, this absurdity!

(‘The Seven Old Men’)

City life in this poetry is not modern inventions, commerce, and progress but dangerous passage through a forest of anonymous figures imbued with mystery, who produce a vivid sense of a world not masterable except by arbitrary and unstable acts of imagination.

But Victor Hugo had written poems of the city—about beggars, prostitutes, and working men, among others—and Baudelaire declared Hugo ‘the most gifted, the most visibly elected to express through poetry what I will call the mystery of life’. What was different about Baudelaire’s poetry?

The repudiation of sentimental themes is a major aspect of Baudelaire’s modernity. Baudelaire complained about Hugo’s prostitutes with hearts of gold and criminals with consciences, and proposed to write a story of an unrepentant criminal enjoying the fruits of his crimes. Hugo wrote a poem called ‘Never Insult a Woman who is Falling’, but Baudelaire always insults, while lamenting and celebrating at the same time. His ‘Little Old Women’ are ‘singular beings with appalling charms’:

These dislocated wrecks were women once …

. . . . .

They toddle, every bit like marionettes,

Or drag themselves like wounded animals.

They ‘trudge on, stoic, without complaint, | Through the chaotic city’s teeming waste’, and the poet who follows them, as other men would follow a beautiful young woman, observes ‘with tenderness, and restless eye intent’, imaginatively sharing their ‘lost days’, their secret pleasures and fears. They are ‘Ruins! my family! my fellow-minds!’.

These energetic verses, whose tone shifts radically from irony to empathy, from cruelty and detachment to declamation, are more modern in their discontinuities than anything Hugo wrote. As in the poems about lesbians and about heterosexual love, the harshness and shifts of mood give this verse what seems a modern complexity.

These changes of tone are part of the irony and self-consciousness that mark Baudelaire’s verse, where the speakers often turn and reflect upon what they have been saying or doing and its implications. ‘Heautontimoroumenos’ (the self-torturer) is the most extreme example, where the speaker begins by announcing an intention to strike the beloved coldly, without anger, for sadistic pleasure, but the very formulation of this intention brings an ironic self-reflection, in which he becomes a victim of his own self-consciousness,

Thanks to voracious Irony

Who gnaws on me and shakes me hard.

She’s in my voice, in all I do!

Her poison flows in all my veins!

The irony described here is inseparable from a process of poetic self-dramatization: the rhetorical resources of the poetic imagination become a source of self-torture as well as of perverse satisfaction.

Less extreme and grandiloquent, and perhaps the more sinister, is the movement of ‘Gaming’, which begins with the description of decrepit gamblers and prostitutes in a shabby gaming house. This turns out to be a dream or vision of the speaker, in which he sees himself mutely envying ‘these men’s tenacious lust, | The morbid gaiety of these old whores’. Reflecting on the implications of this vision, though, he is frightened that he should envy ‘this poor lot | Who rush so fervently to the abyss’. It is indeed a peculiar condition, of the sort these poems excel in portraying.

When the focus of interest in the poem is not objects and events themselves but the speaker’s relation to them and his responses to this relation, then we have dramas of consciousness which readers and critics have found particularly modern. The second ‘Spleen’ poem is a compelling example: it describes a loss of self in images that make unreal the experiences they purport to capture. The poem begins:

More memories than if I’d lived a thousand years!

A giant chest of drawers, stuffed to the full,

With balance sheets, love letters, lawsuits, verse

Romances, locks of hair rolled in receipts,

Hides fewer secrets than my sullen skull.

It is a pyramid, a giant vault,

Holding more corpses than a common grave.

—I am a graveyard hated by the moon

Where like remorse the long worms crawl, and turn

Attention to the dearest of my dead.

What could be thought of as a wealth of memories is experienced as excessive or oppressive, unmasterable as the experience of a subject. The imaginative operations of an ironic, self-reflective consciousness transform this heterogeneous series of writings and documents into so much dead matter: first more corpses than the common grave, and then, in an image which one contemporary reviewer quoted as summing up The Flowers of Evil, ‘a graveyard hated by the moon’.

As the accumulated memories become dead matter, ennui takes on immortal proportions. Ennui is the force of boredom and depression that ‘To the Reader’ calls the ugliest, meannest, most obscene monster in the human zoo. The self, further depersonalized and addressed just as ‘living matter’ (matière vivante), is identified with a granite monument forgotten in the desert.

—I Ienceforth, o living flesh, you are no more!

You are of granite, wrapped in a vague dread,

Slumbering in some Sahara’s hazy sands,

An ancient sphinx lost to a careless world,

Forgotten on the map, whose haughty mood

Sings only in the glow of setting sun.

The poem began with the question of what becomes of the self among this excess of discourses and experiences which cannot be mastered or integrated—a condition more frustrating, even ridiculous, than tragic—but it ends with an identification of the self with the lurid figure of a sphinx forgotten in a desert, singing to the setting sun. The very hyperbole of the images—a graveyard hated by the moon, a piece of granite wrapped in a vague dread—suggests that we are dealing not with empirical incidents or predicaments but with the drama of a generalized modern consciousness. The poem’s emphatic denial that any of the experiences or memories are themselves of interest leaves the impression that any value must lie in the operations of consciousness themselves, such as memory, revulsion, or self-criticism. Such operations of consciousness, this poetry shows, can even give an interest and value to the most horrendous conditions—such as being more full of dead bodies than a common grave. The perverse pleasure that the modern subject dramatized in the poem takes in representing itself as a forgotten sphinx grumpily singing in the desert suggests that there are ways of surviving the disintegration and depersonalization of the self described here, that whatever the modern threats to the self, a certain poetic consciousness can salvage at least itself from the collapse of signification and value, and that, thus, the subject remains the source of meaning and untranscendable horizon.